


Merely Human

by RedHorse



Series: Dear Lily [4]
Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: F/M, Gen, M/M, Moral Ambiguity, Native American Character(s), Not Canon Compliant - Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, Ritual Magic, Sad conclusions about portraits, Soul Bond, Tweens in unrequited love, terrible politicians
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-05-05
Updated: 2018-09-21
Packaged: 2019-04-19 07:19:42
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 9
Words: 24,615
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14232156
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/RedHorse/pseuds/RedHorse
Summary: Peter was a good storyteller. Peter was good at anything, if he put his mind to it. Maybe not the best, but good. He could be a good wizard - he’d been an animagus by fifteen, after all - he could be a good student. He could be a good friend, and he could be a good spy.A different prisoner escapes Azkaban in Harry’s third year. Fourth story in a series set in an AU where Lily lives, and everything changes as a result. Nearly everything.





	1. Chapter 1

_June 1, 1993_

On the effective date of the Werewolf Protection Act, Remus stood outside the ministry in the rain, his hands on Zack’s shoulders, murmuring the incantation to renew the feeble shield he had cast to keep them dry. It wouldn’t have been a difficult spell to maintain under ordinary circumstances, but this day, only thirty hours after the night of the full moon, it was a struggle to stay upright, let alone use any magic.

For that reason, many of the stoic, grim faces surrounding him were saturated with rain. A couple wielded umbrellas somewhat clumsily, and most were shivering in the threadbare attire of the poverty stricken. His kind had been shunned to the point of unemployability for all Remus’s life. He had dedicated his career and spare time to changing the state of things, including persuading so many frightened men and women to reveal their true selves, accepting the repudiation in an effort to further the cause. To show those who knew them that a werewolf was not a monster; that in fact, they had unwittingly called a werewolf a friend.

Now, Remus saw accusing glares on many of the familiar faces in the crowd. He bore it with all the steadiness he could muster; he met their eyes and stilled his trembling hands by grasping Zack more tightly. In response, the boy tilted his head back against Remus’s torso and smiled up at him with such uncomplicated trust, Remus thought his heart might stop.

Merlin, he thought, feeling sick. How we’ve failed him. He wished Sirius was there to lean on—physically, emotionally. Remus had, in happier post-moon periods, found a shy delight in the special care that Sirius liked to show him when he was weakened. So much so he had sometimes feigned the exhaustion for a few extra hours to prolong all the fuss.

But there was another line for the Responsible Parties. Bile rose in Remus’s throat, recalling Sirius’s offhand remark that the office was the same one where one licensed pets and magical creatures.

 _Tagged, like a dog_ , Remus thought bleakly.

A tall, willowy witch appeared in the doorway, in bright green glasses and Department of Magical Creatures uniform robes. She looked at them all with a tight-lipped, but not unkind smile. Remus was so brittle at that point that this bare indicator of humanity undid him; the shield failed and he and Zack were abruptly doused with rain. The boy yelped, then laughed, because Zack was perpetually good-humored, and Remus hoped to hell that the world he’d been born into didn’t soon take that away.

As the assembled crowd moved forward to the entrance, Remus was startled by the strong smell of wet dog. He laughed, pained, because he didn’t know what else to do, and bent over to press a quick, desperate kiss into the hair on the top of Zack’s head.

Sirius stood in another line in another part of the ministry, trying not to think too carefully about what was happening. Sirius often used conversation as a distraction. He was excellent at polite and largely meaningless socializing, and falling into the familiar patterns, drilled into him since infancy, was oddly soothing. He had initiated the strategy with the wizard in line just ahead of him, an aged Pureblood who had known all of Sirius’s great aunts and had struck a mutually beneficial agreement with a werewolf for personal security, which sounded to Sirius like voluntary enslavement, if there was any such thing.

Only slightly less depressing was his exchange with the wizard and witch who fell into line behind him, and informed him they had generously agreed to register a werewolf couple in exchange for a modest monthly fee.

Merlin.

By the time Sirius was summoned into a chamber to fill out the paperwork, he was feeling more off balance than he could recall since boyhood, possibly the moment when he had realized, listening to James wax poetic about the most compelling aspects of Lily’s figure, that he strongly preferred the shape of a man.

And that was before he saw the contract.

“I don’t understand,” Sirius told the ministry staffer, a young man barely old enough to shave and wearing ill-fitting gray robes. Sirius double checked the magical signature and then the signature page, trying to reconcile the two. “This is spelled as a binding contract, but there’s nowhere for Remus to sign.”

“I’m, I’m sorry, sir, but - Remus?”

Sirius returned his blank look with one of his own and tapped the first page, just above Remus’s name. “Remus Lupin. Zack is a minor, so I suppose I...understand,” the word had to be forced through gritted teeth, “in his case, but...”

“Ah! Oh, yes, I see, sir. The werewolf. There is no need for the creature to sign. His legal status being, ah, that of a creature.”

His universe was off kilter. This couldn’t be right, that his—that _Remus_ , the best and kindest person in the world, who was more of an adult and a better caretaker than Sirius could ever hope to be, was subject to this horror. He stared down at the contract, and briefly considered setting it on fire, then he recalled the sight of Remus’s face that morning in the safely neutral space of their home.

 _Don’t do anything rash_ , Remus had said, his large hands warm on Sirius’s shoulders, their bodies so close that Sirius could sense Remus’s steady breath. _No grand gestures, either._

It hadn’t hit Sirius at that point. He’d been upset by the election, shocked by the legislation, but it had all seemed like—philosophy, principle, not—well, he’d known that so many of the innocent, already unfortunate werewolves would suffer. But he’d thought that, with him, Remus and Zack’s lives would not be truly changed. Distasteful though it was, it was only paperwork.

Remus, who knew him as no one else ever had or ever would, realized that Sirius wouldn’t feel the new reality in his bones until he was physically there, in the ministry, a table separating him from a bureaucrat who was telling him that his soulmate and child were mere “creatures,” and reminding him in a monotone and indicating with his index finger the paragraph which stated expressly that the registrant would be personally responsible for any attacks, thefts, or acts of vandalism committed by his charge(s).

Sirius wanted to go back in time to that morning and kiss Remus. To press their mouths together, grasp the taller, leaner man’s waist, and bite his lower lip, gently, until he felt it tighten and curve into a smile.

The only way Sirius knew to articulate his feelings for Remus was in this way. For someone who talked with ease, he struggled to actually say anything meaningful with words, and it troubled him that instead of offering true comfort on this horrible morning, Sirius had only grinned at Remus’s admonishment, rolled his eyes, and made a playful promise to “be good.”

At least Zack was too young to really understand, which left Sirius doubly motivated to clean up this ridiculous mess before he was. Although it was already too late, he recalled, for Hogwarts.

*****

In the coldest, wettest depths of Azkaban, a handful of prisoners clung to one another against the chill, and told one another stories in low voices. There were rules about the subterranean levels, where the dementors didn’t seem able to tread. New men didn’t get an invitation, unless they had or formed allies with the older set. The Leaders decided who was welcome, and the first criteria was the ability to do something sufficiently entertaining to pass the time. Because of the total darkness, that meant either singing or storytelling, ever since the ancient witch who knew enough wandless magic to feebly illuminate the air around the Leaders’ faces had finally died.

Peter was a good storyteller. Peter was good at anything, if he put his mind to it. Maybe not the best, but good. He could be a good wizard - he’d been an animagus by fifteen, after all - he could be a good student. He could be a good friend, and he could be a good spy.

He could not be the best at anything, but he’d been resigned to that fact since some time during his second year at Hogwarts. If he had been a little less intelligent, and never figured out his own limitations, he thought he would have had a happier life, if likely a briefer one.

It was strange, but even in the forgotten human storage container that was Azkaban, every spot of pleasant emotion hunted by monsters, perpetually cold and almost constantly blind, Peter couldn’t exactly regret being alive, or any of the choices that had ensured he would be.

Maybe he had finally found something he was better than good at. Many lost their will far earlier in their tenure, and threw themselves off the parapets and into the sea like stones. When they washed up on the sharp rocks of the craggy beach, the dementors would gather up a handful of prisoners to bury them.

The prisoners didn’t bother killing each other as a rule, though there was plenty of violence, and without healing magic the dismal conditions could spell death from a wound that wouldn’t be a serious concern for a free witch or wizard.

Peter was luckier than most. Long before he was officially welcomed in the underground, he could join the true rats in the tunnels that carried him there, rest in the shadows and hear the singing and the music. The dementors didn’t seem very interested in rats.

This day, or night, it was impossible to tell, the group sat close, shoulder to shoulder. Outside it had to be raining, because water was coursing around the edges of the chamber, slowly carving a deeper cavern out of the rock and soil. One day it would go below sea level and no one would be able to gather here any longer. Peter wondered if he would still be alive then, and forced to keep company with the rats more than he already did.

Peter told the story this time.

“Once there was a boy whose parents hated him on sight. They kept him in the attic like a squib, and the elves were his only caretakers, and his only source of food. For years he lived in the dark, dirty and alone, until the ghost of a squib ancestor was finally convinced to take pity on him, and opened a secret door to a passageway that could take him to any room in the house, through the walls.

“From inside the walls, he could hear and see everything. The walls were transparent when viewed from the inside out. So the boy watched his parents while they kissed and while they argued, when they had dinner guests and when they rose at midnight and went to sit in the dark kitchen and drink tea. He watched them read in silence. He watched the house when it was empty, too, though he didn’t leave the walls.

“Then the boy began to realize that something worse than a ghost was with them in the house. Doors slammed and the floor sometimes went soft and uneven, like a breathing hide. The windows sometimes shattered and the broken glass raced toward his parents’ faces. His father lost an eye this way.

“The presence didn’t ignore the boy, but it seemed fond of him. In the perfect darkness of his attic room, the boy couldn’t hope to see the beast, but he felt it there, beside him when he slept, emanating heat and smelling faintly of blood.

“The boy watched his parents grow drawn and ill, and waited for them to leave the house. He thought If the monster could scare them away he could leave the walls and live in the house, amongst the books he didn’t know to read and in the light that was too bright for his underdeveloped eyes. He imagined the softness of the beds and what it might feel like to be immersed in the perfumed hot water of a bath.

“As the boy grew more eager, the beast was bolder. It clawed the wallpaper from the walls, and shredded the books, silent and invisible. The figures vanished from every portrait in the house and the elves were mute and trembling, barely able to accomplish the most basic tasks.

“The boy’s parents called an expert at last, though they forbade him from entering the attic, and he poured a salt circle and called for ghosts, convinced they were the culprit. They came, the boy saw from the walls. But they were quiet and without malice, even the squib ancestor, who wasn’t asked so didn’t mention the boy she’d set loose in the walls.

“The next expert laid runes under the foundation and broke a curse that had kept three rooms in the house locked for three generations. But the curse breaker couldn’t touch the beast.

“Finally, when the parents were desperate, weak, and gaunt and the boy was sure they would soon give up, a third expert came, in silver-spangled black robes and a conical hat, face dark and wizened from a life in the desert. He spoke with a foreign tongue and when he gazed around the antechamber by the front door (for the floo had been temperamental since the beast first appeared) the boy felt the walls shrink back from him, compressing the boy in the process so that he could hardly breathe.

“The wizard knelt and put the palms of his hands on the floor, and for the first time, the beast made noise. A great wrenching howl came up from the stones in the cellar and down from the roof; every wall and door and window between rattled with it, and after a minute, the expert removed his hands. The house was quiet again, though it seemed to be shuddering all over, and the boy felt the beast near him, hot and coiled like an adder on the defensive.

“‘Your family is at war,’ said the expert, ‘and the house has chosen the side of the heir.’

“‘We have no heir,’ insisted the boy’s mother, but she couldn’t contain a glance toward the attic. Confused and disappointed by the expert’s answer, they sent him away and spoke furiously to one another, too softly for the boy to hear.

“He thought about the beast that was everywhere but couldn’t be seen, and thought suddenly that it wasn’t invisible at all—it _was_ the house, each room in each level, and the attic chamber. The gap in the walls where the boy wandered through the days of his life. The secret lair where the elves slept. And it was on his side.

“The moment he realized that, the boy felt the beast—the house—become alert, like a dog that has heard its masters whistle and waits for a command.

“The boy had never had a moment of power in all his life, and his whole universe was the house. So in that moment, with the entire universe as he knew it, his to command, he was flooded with feeling but no sense of a goal—he felt only satisfied, and confident that what he wanted would come to be, and all he had ever wanted was—

“The boy realized that his parents were screaming. Their screams did not last, because the house had no interest in making them suffer, only in making them gone. From inside the walls, the blood and tissue and fragments of fabric from the robes they wore could not touch the boy, but because the walls were transparent he was suddenly seeing the room as though a red cast had been painted over his eyes. His parents were nothing but a wet mist settling over every surface in the room, which he observed without emotion for some time, until the elves appeared and cleaned carefully until all evidence of his parents had gone.

“The boy lived very comfortably after that. He curtained the windows, and the elves discarded what was left of the books. The boy bathed, and ate, and slept in a soft bed, and the house was his companion for the next hundred years of his long life.”

The crowd was quiet for a few minutes after Peter stopped talking, and then someone snorted. “Peter never tells a story about sunshine and happiness, does he?”

“That’s what Brown is for,” said someone else. They all laughed a little, even though most of them took a shy delight in Brown’s long and detailed descriptions of hot sunlight, flower gardens and delicious meals.

“Did you make that one up yourself, Peter?”

“No, he didn’t. I am sure I’ve heard it before.”

“It’s an old story,” Peter said quietly, looping his arms around his knees, smiling a fond smile that none of them could see. “A good friend told it to me.” It had been one of Lily’s favorites. He wondered if she was still interested in house magic, wherever she was.


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Please note that the date for the last chapter is June 1, 1993. This chapter takes place BEFORE the other one. I don't usually write chapters out of chronological order but the other chapter is a much stronger start, and I really don't think it should confuse your read. Largely because so very little happens in Chapter 2 (hey, it happens!) and nothing in this chapter involves the POV characters in Chapter 1.

Taos, New Mexico, USA

May 1, 1993

“What’s it like?” Harry asked Avery. They were both well-fed and enjoying a companionable silence after one of the Lahoi barbecues. “Having a vision? Have you ever seen the future?”

“That’s not really how it works,” Avery said, smiling. He had one arm looped around his left knee, which was drawn near his chest, the heel of his foot on his chair. Harry was huddled up in a hoodie with his hands in the pocket. It had been ninety degrees that afternoon, but the stars were appearing in the clear sky and the desert was washed in cold night air already. Somewhere, a coyote howled. Harry loved many of the places he’d lived, Hogwarts included, but something about the deck off the little house by the Pueblo would always feel like home.

“Dr. Lahoi—Dr. Emily—said that the vision is something a human mind isn’t designed to interpret, and that’s about the best way it can be put, I think. My grandmother says the vision is a feather and the future is the whole bird, plus where the whole bird is going and what it can see.”

Harry liked the way Avery’s grandmother put it. It was appropriately confusing. He tipped his head back to watch the constellations come into focus as the sky transitioned steadily to the deep blue that came just before the eventual, inky black. Harry felt so tired his eyelids were sore. His mom and the Lahois kept casting the protective magic they first put in place when he was six years old, and it kept failing to banish his dreams, so he had been trying not to sleep. Still, it was a comfort to be here, with his mother. Harry also found Avery’s company oddly soothing and wonderful. Harry was trying not to think about the latter feelings too much, even as he absently took in the way Avery’s high cheekbones gave his eyes a slightly slanted look for the umpteenth time, then hid his blush by looking back up at the sky.

“You leave tomorrow?”

Harry nodded. “Now that we’re sure the old ritual won’t work anymore. My mom wants me to go back to school.” He felt a little odd discussing his dreams outside of the family, since it had always been a secret, but it was something of a relief, too. Instead of seeing disgusted or unnaturally interested, Avery only nodded, his frown sympathetic.

“I also think my mom is going to interrogate the headmaster, or something,” Harry added.

“What did he do? Or not do?”

Harry sighed. “No one tells me anything about him but I know that most of the kids in my house hate him, and most of the kids in the other houses love him, and I think my uncles love him too. My mom doesn’t like him at all, that’s easy to tell. Which isn’t really like her.” Harry knew he was thinking aloud, and that Avery probably couldn’t care less, so he cut himself off and smiled.

“It will be pretty boring here without all of us, I bet.”

Avery grinned at him in a way that made Harry’s toes feel hotter than even an overzealous warming charm could. “Oh, I don’t know. Now that the word is out that I’m a Seer, I bet I’ll be invited to all the hot parties.”

They both laughed, since the median age around the Pueblo was roughly 50, and while they were a social bunch, gatherings tended to start in the early afternoon and end by nightfall.

“My grandmother will be back for us soon. She flies out on Saturday.”

Harry let a brief silence fall before he cleared his suddenly dry throat. “We’ll keep in touch, yeah? With your pouches.” He deliberately looked from side to side as though if someone overheard, they would immediately suspect the secret of Avery’s mated pouches, which had a charm that let letters pass through. Watching him, Avery chuckled.

“Yes. And don’t worry, it’s not taboo to bring up the pouches at all. Just…you know, their hidden features.” He winked.

“Right,” Harry said, clearing his throat again. “Those… _features_ …why are they a secret? I mean, why the, ah…”

“Illegality?” Avery asked, looking amused. But this time _he_ glanced around to be sure no one was close by enough to hear, then continued. “With a little pouch, it’s not such a big deal. But it could still let you smuggle something, or send something harmful to someone. And the possibilities are endless if the objects are large enough. My grandmother said that the spell used to let a person travel from one place to another, sort of like a Floo, and that it was a gringo—white people—thing when these lands were first settled to ban the magic, because it kept my people from being too mobile.” He shrugged. “Whatever the reasons _then_ , there are probably some good reasons _now_ for not letting people travel so easily and secretly. But like I told you, the way my grandmother makes the pouches now, only paper will go through reliably. Once Bette and I tried to send a mouse.” His face twisted briefly in a combination of disgust, regret and grief. “It was…not pretty.”

Harry wrinkled his nose and shuddered, asking no more. He had been wearing both his mother’s and Avery’s pouch on one thong since he had hastily packed to leave Hogwarts. He wasn’t sure why, but the thought of Avery knowing it was there, under his shirt and against his skin, embarrassed him. Especially in moments like this, when he had the strange urge to touch it.

“As long as you don’t repeat that experiment, or anything like it, I’ll keep it close,” Avery said, his words straying so near Harry’s thoughts that Harry jerked his head up to look at the older boy, who wasn’t looking at him, to Harry’s relief. He was watching Bette demonstrating a straight conjuration to a few of the Lahois’ colleagues to convince them that conjuring was _not_ just _imperfect summoning_ , and Harry grinned even while the prospect of the inevitable argument to come made him wince. A bright yellow rabbit with a broad duck’s bill and tiny tennis shoes on each of its little paws walked a few circles around the group on its hind legs.

“Now tell me _that_ is naturally occurring in nature!” Bette insisted, just loud enough to be overheard. Two of the witches in her audience whispered to one another and then one of them said something that Harry couldn’t make out. He and Avery watched anyway, amused, while Bette terminated her spell and the duck-rabbit vanished.

“ _That wasn’t a banishment_ ,” Bette probably said, based upon Harry’s knowledge of lipreading and the context.

“Tell me about your classes at Hogwarts,” Avery said after a few more minutes, when Bette stopped casting spells and there was nothing else to watch but the feverish expressions and rapid gesticulations of the academically impassioned.

They talked for another hour, until all the stars had shown themselves and the horizon was colorless, when all the other guests finally got chased off by the cold. Harry’s mother had come by at one point, not interrupting but dropping a giant blanket in Harry’s lap, and Avery had scooted his chair nearer to Harry’s so they could share it. It seemed suddenly, strangely intimate when they abruptly found themselves alone. At least, it did to Harry. Avery remained relaxed, his smile easy, his dark eyes reflecting a lot of starlight. Harry’s heart was still pounding after his mother herded him inside.

By the time he had brushed his teeth and washed his face, changed into pajamas and was contemplating bed, the pleasant and distracting effects of Avery’s company had worn off. Harry’s mother came into the room and sat on the edge of the mattress, looking up at him questioningly.

“Want dreamless sleep?” Her voice was neutral, but Harry knew she wanted him to take it. Which was saying something, since she had never been a proponent before. When he grudgingly nodded, she opened her left hand, which had been clasped loosely in her lap, to reveal a vial.

“Severus left it,” she explained. Her brow was wrinkled with worry, but her voice was warm when she said Harry’s professor’s name, like she couldn’t help it. Harry smiled ruefully at her and reached for the potion, but before he could take it her fingers grasped his, holding his hand, but awkwardly with the potion between their palms.

“We’ll figure all of this out, Harry,” she promised. Harry looked at her warm green eyes, so like his.

Harry nodded, then sat down beside her and let her hug him with one arm while he leaned against her, the potion now in his hand. He hadn’t even told her about the diary. Maybe if he had, he could actually feel comforted.

*****

 

The next morning, Harry was eating scrambled eggs at the Lahois’ little kitchen table when Avery and Bette showed up to say goodbye. Bette came in first, eyeing him the way she always did, as though she couldn’t be sure he was who he pretended to be until she’d heard him speak.

“Morning, Harry,” she said, sitting down across from him and poking his eggs with her forefinger. “Want to share?”

Harry didn’t, particularly. He was constantly hungry. But he didn’t really want to eat the eggs she’d just touched, either, so he tried not to roll his eyes and got up to get her a fork. When Avery came in, Harry had nudged the plate nearer the center of the table and they were both eating from it. Looking amused, Avery walked around to squeeze Harry’s shoulder and smile.

“Are ya ready to go, then?”

Harry nodded, thinking that if Bette cared to look up at them, he would have no way to keep her from seeing his reaction to Avery’s casual touch. She didn’t.

“Yeah, all packed,” Harry confirmed. “We’re taking a Muggle airplane,” he added.

“’Muggle,’” Avery echoed, sitting down and watching Bette polish off Harry’s breakfast. “You’re really sounding like a Brit, now, Harry.”

Harry laughed wryly. “The Brits would disagree,” he said with certainty. “They alternate between telling me I sound like a yank and telling me I sound like a Mug—a no-maj.”

“They really don’t like no-majes, do they?”

“Um,” Harry said, thinking about it for a moment. “I don’t really know, to be honest. I mean, the kids in my house don’t, or if they do they won’t admit it. At first some of them could be pretty nasty even about witches and wizards with no-maj family, but they mostly don’t talk like that around me anymore.” He paused. “But it’s definitely... different.”

Growing up in MACUSA territory, Harry had certainly heard derogatory remarks about no-majes, but it hadn’t prepared him for the deep biases he found rampant at Hogwarts. His mother had explained it to him before he started school, of course, but her insight was somewhat limited by her own upbringing. It was only by talking to students who had been raised strictly magical that Harry learned how much less integrated into the Muggle world the average wizarding family in Britain was, compared to the average wizarding family in North America.

“Hopefully they’ll change,” Avery said firmly. “I’m sure you’re doing what you can to educate them.”

Harry nodded, thinking of first year, then stopped nodding when he thought about how disconnected he’d become in his current year. His stomach tightened and he was suddenly glad Bette had appropriated so much of his breakfast.

“Ready, Harry?” His mother was standing in the doorway. Harry nodded, getting up, still lost in his own thoughts as he followed her outside, Avery close behind and Bette trailing. Dr. Laura was already in the driver’s seat of the Lahois’ little blue car, and Dr. Emily was putting his mother’s purple, Muggle-looking suitcase she’d acquired for the journey in the trunk of the car. Most of their stuff was shrunken, disillusioned and pocketed, but sometimes the Muggle customs officers got suspicious of international travelers without any luggage.

“Take care,” Avery said, surprising Harry by reaching out and hugging him. Harry had a brief and pleasant impression of lean, strong arms and a warm and solid body before it was over, too quickly for him to feel nervous. He grinned at Avery and nodded, then cocked his head at Bette, who rolled her eyes and hugged him too, somehow without making physical contact with anything but her arms.

“See you kids later,” Dr. Emily said to the cousins, her look fond. Harry got into the car, and the donkey brayed a few times before he got his door closed, as though it too was saying farewell. The thought made him smile as they pulled around the little circle driveway and toward the road. He couldn’t stop himself from twisting in his seat to look back at Avery and Bette, who had been abruptly swarmed by the chickens. Avery had his head thrown back in a laugh while Bette, arms flailing, sidestepped a pair of roosters that seemed particularly attracted to the bright pink laces on her high-tops.

Harry’s mother, beside him in the backseat, was looking at him when he faced forward again and buckled his seatbelt. She reached out and carded her fingers through his hair. “How was your night? Did the dreamless sleep make you woozy?”

“Hate that stuff,” Dr. Laura chimed in before Harry could answer. He met his mother’s eyes and shook his head.

“Trust Severus to have perfected the recipe,” Dr. Emily said, turning to look at Lily over her shoulder with a sly smile, as though she might embarrass her with the merest mention of the potions master. It was still surreal to Harry that they had all met Professor Snape. That he’d been _here_ , in this place that was like a different universe to the stone castle and medieval landscape at Hogwarts. Harry couldn’t imagine it, even though he knew it had happened. Professor Snape out in the desert in his black robes and polished boots, whereas casual dress around the Pueblo tended to involve burkenstock sandals, cargo shorts and—in Dr. Laura’s case—fanny packs. Or Professor Snape of the gleaming antique officer furniture in the Lahois’ house, with its white rabbit and modern furniture.

“Mum,” Harry murmured. “What am I going to tell the other kids when they ask why I was gone? Or why _Professor Snape_ was gone, too?”

“Family matters,” she said. “All the Slytherins should know better than to question that.” She paused. “As for the Gryffindors—they’ll keep asking, but it’s not like they can force the details out of you. And it’s better they don’t know all of it.”

Harry didn’t point out that he only had one friend in Gryffindor, if that. He’d neglected Ron as severely as anyone else—more so, probably, since he didn’t even have the passing contact he did with the other Slytherins or a study group like he did Hermione and Neville. Feeling forlorn, he rested his head against the back of the seat and closed his eyes. The only thing worse than Muggle car rides, which were bad enough, was a Muggle plane. He needed to try to keep his head clear to survive the brutal transcontinental flight in his near future.


	3. Chapter 3

August 1, 1993

Gilderoy stood outside the pub, studying his glamour nervously in a small conjured hand mirror, and then decided that behaving so conspicuously ran directly against the purpose of the glamour in the first place. It wasn’t as though standing there worrying would render him better-attuned to average Muggle fashion and posture. He noted that, like his glamour, the two men laughing together as they walked into the building wore the odd denim pants called _jeans_ and the odd slippers with baffling laces called _trainers_ , and made himself follow them inside before the door could bang shut.

Rosemary Black Worthington looked exactly like herself, which made her easy to find. She disdained glamours almost as heartily as she disdained Muggle business establishments, but she tolerated both for the sake of their weekly rendezvous. Her Muggle-repelling magic was so unnecessarily strong that morning that Gilderoy watched one Muggle, trying to walk and talk to his companion at the same time, bounce off the perimeter of the spell as though it was a shield, then rub his arm and look around in confusion before rerouting to follow his friend across the room, none the wiser.

When Gilderoy sat down across from Lady Worthington, he let his own glamour fall. He felt depleted from stress and lack of sleep. She seemed to find him lacking in appearance as well, gauging by her displeased frown as her narrow eyes took him in. She wore black, of course, and today her collar was high and scalloped, stark against the nearly translucent skin of her throat. She also wore a hat with a low, flat crown and a fairly wide brim, set off by an asymmetrical bit of black lace veil, attached at an angle. Gilderoy admired the elegant effect for a moment, then cleared his throat, no longer able to resist her expectant look.

“McGonagall has approved it all,” he said, still with a degree of sincere disbelief. He had presented her the curriculum he had spent hours carefully crafting, revising again and again, certain that she would still find some telling detail he had missed and unravel the entire plan. Her brows had risen higher and higher as she’d read, but when she finally looked up from the scroll and met Gilderoy’s gaze over her glasses, it was obvious that her astonishment was of a pleased, rather than horrified, variety.

Lady Worthington was giving him a similar look now. He was annoyed to think that she had doubted he would pull off the assignment. He was very skilled at deception—as she had proven herself all too aware, considering their first meeting. Gilderoy still fidgeted uncomfortably at the memory of Lady Worthington taking him, step by step beginning with his first non-experimental _Obliviate_ , through the revised—chillingly accurate—version of his biography she promised to write if he did not carefully consider the Dark Lord’s invitation.

“Congratulations,” she said, her deep voice approving. “Now the real work begins. To…proceed, in your true course, without detection shall be a greater challenge than simply presenting an innocuous outline.”

Gilderoy refrained from making an annoyed sound. He was too afraid of her for that. He simply nodded. “Of course.”

There was a cup of something in front of Lady Worthington. He wondered if she had brought it with her; he couldn’t imagine what kind of magic she could cast that would compete with her repelling charm effectively enough to get any service. Indeed, as he looked around the room, he saw that within the charm’s range there was an effective bubble of space, creating some congestion in the other parts of the pub. A few of the Muggles, who must be the most perceptive of the set, looked vaguely uneasy, but certainly none of them were so much as challenging the charm’s effects. Gilderoy, who had never been very good at the spell, reminded himself that while she might be physically feeble, Lady Worthington’s magic was among the most powerful he’d personally observed.

Soberly, he returned his attention to her, watching as she sipped from her cup—which was unadorned, but appeared to be made of solid pewter, so, certainly not anything that the pub would have served her with—then dabbed at her upper lip with a green silk handkerchief.

“We won’t meet again until the need arises,” she said. “When it does, someone will contact you in the usual way.”

He nodded and watched her draw her wand and vanish, barely remembering to reapply his glamour before her repellant charm faded completely. A puzzled-looking waitress appeared at his table with an apologetic smile.

“Sorry—have you been waiting long? What can I get for you?”

Gilderoy stammered out an order for tea and hunched his shoulders defensively as she walked away. He didn’t want to linger in the pub, but it seemed suspicious to storm out without having ordered anything, when it appeared he was settled at a table.

Gilderoy had never pictured himself as a dark wizard. Even when he had been acquiring material for his books, he had tried to practice _Obliviate_ with a delicate hand. It had seemed like a victimless crime.

The crime he now intended would have plenty of victims, and at least some of them would be children. Which was, Gilderoy was certain, generally thought to ratchet actions significantly higher on the reprehensibility scale.

The tea was weak. He glared at the cup for a while after the waitress brought it, then left an aggressively high tip along with his payment on the table and escaped back outdoors to look for a safe place to disapparate.

When he was safely back in Hogsmeade he stumbled away from the apparition point and straightened his robes. He was not the only faculty person to have spent the summer at the school—in fact, most of them did, sad, lonely lot that they were. But Gilderoy had avoided socializing with the other teachers to the greatest possible extent, keeping himself cloistered in his office working furiously on his curriculum. Instead of unfriendly, he was trying to come off as dedicated and, also, someone who wrote and created with an artist’s focus. For the most part, they seemed to be buying it, evident by Poppy Pomfrey appearing in the doorway of Honeydukes, heavily laden with heavy packages, and immediately beaming at Gilderoy as though they were close friends and not colleagues who only exchanged pleasantries.

“This isn’t what it looks like,” she said with a wink.

Of course, candy. Health. Incompatible. Gilderoy produced a solemn smile and placed his hand over his heart. “You have my silence.”

Poppy looked pleased. “It’s nice to see you outside the castle, Professor Lockhart! We worried you’d waste away in your rooms before you had a spare moment to enjoy your summer.”

“Oh, certainly not, I make sure and get a spot of exercise now and then.” Recognizing that he was going to have no choice, Gilderoy put on a bright smile. “Would you allow me to walk you back to the castle?”

Poppy was a rather clever witch with an acerbic wit, and under other circumstances Gilderoy might have made a sincere effort to befriend her. But not only was he distracted by his task, he also thought it would be best not to get too attached to any Hogwarts resident if he wanted to deliver what he’d promised the dark lord’s proxy with _de minimus_ guilt.

“Minerva tells us your curriculum is incredibly innovative,” Poppy said as they passed through the outskirts of Hogsmeade. “I think she’s a little jealous that _she_ didn’t come up with the idea of incorporating some history lessons under the guise of ‘creating context’ for another subject. The way she bemoans History of Magic…I can’t tell you.”

Gilderoy indulged in the desire to preen—and tried not to reveal the competing urge to wring his hands—at Poppy’s chosen subject. The curriculum _was_ good, he knew. He was almost proud of his own achievement. “Well,” he said, trying for a combination of smug and diplomatic, “Professor Binns is _literally_ set in his ways.”

Poppy snorted. “Fixed at death, wasn’t he? History wasn’t my strength, but I do remember learning actual relevant and fairly recent history as a student. I’ve never quite understood Dumbledore’s approach to the subject.”

Gilderoy had developed his own theories over the summer, though he certainly wouldn’t share them with Poppy. He shrugged, as though unconcerned. “It’s a difficult subject. There’s more material than there are classroom hours in which to cover it. Besides, I imagine Binns lowers the bill in the staff compensation column.” He winked at Poppy, and she laughed, then shook her head.

“I don’t think so, actually. I’m fairly sure he gets the same salary all of us do, and it’s placed in a vault where his heirs can access it.”

Gilderoy hadn’t known that, but it was consistent with his theory that Dumbledore was _trying_ to generate an ignorant generation of witches and wizards, save those who had received selective material at home, which was hardly any better. Gilderoy’s father was something of an amateur historian, and he had kept their personal library well-stocked. The coincidence served Gilderoy very well over the summer, as those same texts came in very handy when Gilderoy began to lay out the history-lesson aspect of the curriculum.

“Care to join me for tea? I have a few chocolates here to share,” Poppy asked, winking and holding up her shrunken bags of candy invitingly.

“Better not,” Gilderoy said with his best regretful look. “My little break is now at its end.”

“An educator’s work never ends,” Poppy said. “Whereas I am without a worry in the world so long as my disaster-prone little patients are away.”

They said they’d see one another at dinner, and Gilderoy returned to his rooms and threw himself into a chair. The floo was quiet, but every time he looked at it, now, he imagined a face in the flames which redoubled his unease. He knew it was only a matter of time.

****

August 5, 1993

“Draco, will you _sit down_ ,” Hermione pleaded quietly for the tenth time in as many minutes, watching Draco prowl around the second-floor study at 12 Grimmauld Place like a caged animal. He seemed to take some kind of Pureblooded offense at the home of his ancestors being occupied by nonrelatives, and couldn’t stop making scathing remarks about every redecorating decision the Potters had made. Hermione, who had been present the summer before when the house resembled nothing more than the decrepit tomb of mad dark wizards, didn’t have much sympathy for his outrage.

He didn’t listen to her, of course, so Hermione gave up, her annoyance tempered by the pleasant sight he made even in his present mood. He had grown substantially over the summer, filling out here and there so that he could no longer be called gangly, and gotten a few inches taller, too. That made him quite significantly taller than Harry, who was sitting on the other end of the sofa from Hermione and whose irritation with Draco did not appear to be tempered by Hermione’s helpless affection. She reminded herself that they didn’t like one another, at all, and that it would fall on her to mediate their grievances so that they had a hope of working together to solve the mystery of the old diary.

“Now, Harry, you said that you haven’t spoken to your uncle all summer?”

Harry dragged his attention from Draco, and the glare he’d been wearing eased to an expression of mere disappointment as he shook his head at Hermione and sighed. “It’s been a difficult time, I think, with the election and the passage of that awful law.”

Hermione’s lips compressed in agreement, and she also shot Draco a quelling look, aware that he had some lingering opinions about the Werewolf Protection Act despite their several impassioned debates, all of which Hermione was certain she had won. Draco had indeed been about to open his mouth, doubtless to say something nonconstructive, and obediently closed it at Hermione’s look, though his grey eyes were stormy.

“And your mother hasn’t said anything?” Harry asked Draco. “Nothing at all?”

“Not since she told me that it was adult business and there was no need to talk to anyone about it,” Draco said, crossing his arms. “I should have warned her that I’d be _forced_.” His tone was mild and Hermione knew better than to take him seriously, but Harry’s hackles rose at once.

“No one’s forcing you to be here, at all!”

“Hermione is _my friend_ , Potter. You should be _grateful_ that she…”

“Enough!” Hermione interjected sharply. “If you two insist on fighting, then I refuse to be your excuse. We’re all in this together because you’re _both_ my friends, and Draco’s dad could get in trouble for having a dark artefact, and Harry _is_ in trouble because said dark artefact has done something to his head. Isn’t that right?”

Both boys nodded morosely. Satisfied, Hermione nodded. “Right, then. Harry, tell us about last night’s dream again.”

Harry did. Like the dreams he’d been having every few days since the beginning of the summer, he heard a voice—one they were all rather convinced belonged to Voldemort—and saw through the eyes of someone else. The body varied, but Harry always had the impression that the voice was controlling it. Through the bodies’ eyes Harry had seen mostly unfamiliar places—streets, rooms, and forests. He sometimes heard voices speaking other languages or briefly caught glimpses of cityscapes that were too exotic and varied from one another to all be close in proximity.

But in last night’s dream, the setting was finally a close and familiar one: the streets around 12 Grimmauld Place, as though someone was circling the boundary of the Fidelius Charm like a dog on a hunt. A throbbing in Harry’s scar was always present when he awoke.

“So he’s…here,” Hermione said faintly. Though she trusted the ancient magic of a Fidelius, she still found herself gazing in the direction of the facing street with goosebumps all over her arms.

“Unless the dreams are all a trick,” Draco reminded them. “Why would he want the boy who is supposed to kill him to know exactly where he is?”

“He isn’t afraid of me,” Harry said quietly. “Professor Snape says I can’t have dreamless sleep more than three times a week, and the occlumency lessons are not…going well.” He scowled down at his hands. Hermione had quickly learned that Harry had no patience with himself, and she had a feeling that this character trait was further inhibiting his ability to learn a delicate art like occlumency, since he began every lesson in a state of tense frustration. “He knows I am telling them everything.”

“Then maybe you should stop,” Draco said flatly. Hermione and Harry both stared at him. He shrugged, coloring a little, but didn’t balk. “Stop telling them everything that happens. I bet that will mess with Voldemort. Maybe if he gets mad, he’ll reveal something that could actually matter.”

“That’s…” Hermione was troubled. She didn’t know how to advocate for a strategy that involved _deceiving_ parents and adults, but…

“A really good idea,” Harry said, without a trace of irony in his voice, and nodded approvingly at Draco. For some reason this made Draco turn bright red and look away. Confused, Hermione had no time to consider _that_ baffling reaction before Kreacher apparated in a few inches away from her, the better to completely ignore her existence while asking Draco with simpering politeness whether there was anything he wanted, anything at all.

“Ah, no, thank you, Kreacher,” Draco said stiffly, still discomposed. Harry didn’t seem to notice, having leaned back against the back of the sofa to gaze thoughtfully at the ceiling. Kreacher bowed some more and disapparated, and Hermione chewed nervously on her thumbnail, considering Draco’s idea.

“Maybe it would be all right,” she said reluctantly. “Unless, you know, something really big were to happen in a dream.” So far, all that the dreams really entailed were conversations wherein Voldemort seemed to be sincerely curious about Harry’s life and interests, and Harry tried furiously to retain every second of dialogue in case there was some secret clue therein.

“But I still think you should tell your mom about the diary,” Hermione added. “For all you know, Draco’s mother and your uncle already have.”

Harry snorted. “They haven’t,” he said firmly. “Trust me. She isn’t the sort to _not_ talk to me about something like that, and even though I thought at first she might know, and just be waiting for me to bring it up—like she would think I _should_ do—it’s been too long now. She wouldn’t let it lie this long.”

That did sound like an accurate analysis of Parent Behavior, at least based upon Hermione’s experience with her own. But it didn’t really explain why Sirius and Narcissa wouldn’t have told Lily, or confronted Harry, or _something_. It was as though the events in the library hadn’t happened, except that Draco and Hermione had surreptitiously searched for the diary since then and found no clue it existed at all, much less was in Narcissa or Sirius’s custody. All that Narcissa had told them, emerging from the library that day, was that the matter was “taken care of.”

Whatever _that_ meant.

The floo chimed, and Narcissa’s face appeared in the fire. “There you are,” she said. “I’ve called half the floos in that place. Draco, dear, it’s time to come home and dress for dinner. Remember, the Parkinsons are coming.”

Draco perked up at the prospect of dinner with Pansy, and Hermione tamped down the automatic jealousy she felt at the sight of his pleased smile. Draco told his mother he would come through shortly, and when she was gone Harry sat up primly and faced Hermione.

“We should dress as well, Miss Granger,” he said gravely. “Your best sweatpants. We’ll be taking tuna sandwiches in the lawn chairs in the south garden.”

Hermione hid her smile while Draco smirked. “Ha, ha, ha,” he said slowly, then paused. “What’s a tuna?”


	4. Chapter 4

August 12, 1993

“Sirius is up to something,” Lily told Severus, sitting cross-legged at the end of her bed and scowling at the letter opened over her knee.

She didn’t usually bring up Sirius and Remus with Severus. Though Lily knew Sirius had rendered some form of apology to Severus at Christmas, she had no insight into the details aside from the expression of shock and horror it inspired on Severus’s face when he left the room into which Sirius had taken him aside. She knew that Sirius and James had been detestable teenagers, and she also knew that she had allowed herself to be willfully ignorant of the full range of their antics. The fact that Sirius seemed sincerely ashamed of their past treatment of Severus made her uneasy. Guilt was not an emotion she had known Sirius to experience lightly.

Severus, across the room and buttoning his cuffs, looked at her with a brow arched.

“That, or you’re unnaturally suspicious,” he said dryly.

Indignant, Lily scoffed. “Which is more likely?”

A ghost of a smile passed over Severus’s face. “There are few things more likely than you behaving in a paranoid manner.” He paused, as though to consider, while Lily sputtered. “But Black doing something foolhardy might be one of them.”

“Not paranoid,” Lily muttered, looking back at her letter. “Just cautious.”

Severus must have moved across the room in that silent way he had, because she didn’t hear him approach before she felt the back of his hand brush against her hair. Looking up with her brows still drawn threateningly, Lily found that his eyes were soft and open, and she couldn’t keep hold of her irritation.

“Maybe you should read it,” she suggested hesitantly, lifting the scroll from her lap. Severus’s expression darkened, as though she was offering him something more distasteful than a mere bit of parchment, and Lily sighed. But before she could retract the statement, Severus reached down and snatched Sirius’s letter from her with his long, smooth fingers. His eyes scanned the lines of messy hand writing quickly, and he was frowning thoughtfully when he handed the letter back.

“Perhaps you’re right,” he allowed. Lily couldn’t contain her grin.

“If I’m right,” she said slowly, setting the letter aside and scrambling up onto her knees. “Does that make _you_ wrong?”

Severus put his nose up and folded his arms. “Certainly not. My statements did not constitute an opinion on which of you was more likely to be ridiculous.”

“That’s really not how I heard it.” Lily was grinning. “You know, an adult can admit when he’s wrong, and…” her next few words devolved into giggles when Severus, the great lanky cat that he was, sprang at her and caught her about the waist, rolling their bodies against one another, the arm that wasn’t wrapped tightly around Lily’s middle propping him up so that he looked down at her.

“I am rarely wrong, and when I am, I am quite mature enough to admit it,” Severus assured her, his voice deep and pleased and as close as she had ever heard him come to laughter. Lily reached up and tucked a lock of smooth, dark hair behind his ear, still smiling stupidly.

“Forgive me for ever suggesting otherwise,” she said, wriggling experimentally but finding herself caught tight. It was a sensation she was a little embarrassed to find she liked. Severus watched her blush with an avid light in his eyes, as though discovering something very interesting, and Lily rolled her eyes at him and opened her mouth to tell him not to get any ideas in such a way as to ensure that he got exactly the right ones.

But then, a knock rang out on the other side of Lily’s bedroom door.

“Mum,” called Harry’s voice, sounding awkward. “I don’t mean to, er, interrupt you, but. Hermione’s gotten her hand stuck in a book. Again.”

Severus leaned his forehead against Lily’s shoulder and muttered something unintelligible.

“We’ll be there in a minute, Harry,” she said, hearing Hermione’s voice, coming from further away and impossible to make out precisely, though its tone was distressed.

“Have I mentioned how I loathe children?” Severus muttered. Lily laughed.

“Not today,” she said, patting his head and extricating herself from both Severus and the bed, not without reluctance. “I did think I had gotten all of the cursed books out of the library.” To his mortification, Sirius’s family had been fond of a certain sort of ancient traditional curse meant to protect personal property from theft by Muggles that often went undetected until a Muggle or Muggleborn tried to touch the cursed object. Lily had learned through trial and error how to extract herself from the clutches and stinging sensation of several books and miscellaneous items, including, unfathomably, a rather tattered silk pillowcase. This was the third time Hermione had the misfortune of stumbling across a book Lily had somehow overlooked, and yet the child could not be deterred from exploring the rarer works shelved around the Black house.

“Why is Hermione Granger here first thing in the morning?” Severus asked, almost petulant. Lily eyed him over her shoulder as she stepped into her jeans.

“I told you she stays here sometimes. She has her apprenticeship at the ministry.”

“Ah. Scary Mary, isn’t it?”

“I think that’s what certain _children_ call Lady Redington, yes, Severus.”

“You don’t worry, having a teenage girl in the house with your teenage boy?”

“I think Harry’s perfectly capable of protecting his own virtue,” Lily said, amused. “Or did you think he might prey upon Hermione? Have you _met_ my son?”

Severus conceded her point with a thoughtful nod. “Shall I…go?”

His evening visits were not a secret, but they hadn’t been flaunting his presence in her room exactly, either. Harry’s tone of voice on the other side of the door moments before, however, suggested he was well aware that Lily had a guest, and there was only one person he could believe it to be.

“That’s up to you,” Lily said, then smiled. “But it helps to have two pairs of hands free when the time comes to place the curse-breaking runes.”

“Then I’ll stay,” Severus said, still watching her reaction closely. Lily’s smile broadened, and then went wider still when she saw his cheeks tinge with pink. She leaned over the bed briefly to kiss him, quick and chaste.

“Good,” she said.

****

A few hours later, Hermione was released from a particularly cruel version of the Muggle thief curse—Severus and Lily’s efforts being performed to a constant chorus of “I’m fine, really, just please don’t damage the book!”—and off to the Ministry, and Harry took himself out to the garden to fly a bit. Severus and Lily finally sat down to a fry up produced by a rather aggrieved Kreacher, who was torn between appreciating Severus for the lingering scent of dark magic in his blood and loathing Severus for the unmistakable scent of muggle parentage in his blood. But since he found Lily and Hermione most loathsome of all, Lily thought that Severus was a generally positive influence and said so when Severus gave her a horrified look and asked why they kept the elf around.

“I don’t know what you’re complaining about, he practically likes you,” she said, ignoring the suggestion that they would oust an ancient magical creature to its certain death by sacking him. “I would think he couldn’t get more affectionate, if I hadn’t seen him tripping himself all over Draco Malfoy’s hems.”

“Draco visits, does he?”

Lily swallowed a bite of egg that had the mystical property of being burned on one side and runny on the other. “You know he does.” She twirled her fork against her plate and rolled her eyes. “What do you want to talk about, now that you’ve made that rather obvious change of subject?” A change of subject to the _Malfoys_ , Lily thought, both revolted and intrigued. She was trying to be open-minded when it came to Draco, despite his pretentions, since he seemed to have a basically sweet nature and was clearly devoted (if secretly) to Hermione, a muggleborn. But her opinions about Narcissa and Lucius were less flexible, and she knew Severus was some sort of friend to them, though to her relief they hadn’t discussed it before.

“I knew,” Severus began, in his slow and measured way, “that he was friends with Hermione Granger, but secretly, and that she has visited him at Malfoy Manor.”

Lily was so surprised she dropped her fork. “Lucius. And Narcissa. _Malfoy_. Permit their son to rendezvous with a muggleborn girl, in _Malfoy Manor_?”

Severus rolled his eyes. “There’s no need for dramatics.”

“Isn’t there?” Lily was fairly sure the eggs on Severus’s plate were perfectly cooked. She reached out with her fork to snag a bite, and the taste that burst on her tongue confirmed it. She had been eating terrible food provided by Kreacher for so long that the flavor and texture of a properly scrambled egg nearly undid her. She moaned.

Severus’s eyes took on a familiar gleam, and she laughed, stealing his plate in its entirety and tucking in. “Too hungry. Talk.”

“Dramatics,” Severus repeated, and then wound one long leg between hers beneath the table and cleared his throat. “Lucius and Narcissa are not as puritan in their beliefs about muggleborns and half-bloods as they allow the public to believe. And Narcissa would like for Harry and Draco to be friends. Publicly.”

Lily knew this was one of those moments when her own muggleborn’s upbringing was holding her back from realizing something of significance, but she was hungry and the eggs were good, so she didn’t try to solve Severus’s little puzzle herself.

“Please extrapolate,” she said, and took another bite.

“A formal declaration of friendship between their families. An alliance. An engagement,” he added, and unsuccessfully tried to distract her by plucking his plate back out of her grasp and eating an olive.

“An _engagement_ ,” Lily echoed. “As in…”

“It’s not what muggles mean by it. It’s simply the possibility that a marriage could occur in the future.”

“That’s exactly what muggles mean by it!” Lily wasn’t sure whether to laugh or become angry.

“No, no. I’m not explaining it very well.” He glanced at her accusingly. “I knew you would become upset, and misunderstand me.”

“It’s my fault, I’m sure, when you tell me that a bunch of dark wizards want to engage their dark heir to my only child.” Anger was winning out.

“The muggles mean the word differently. A public friendship isn’t even exclusive, and certainly not binding. It’s merely the families’ communication of their mutual blessing upon the connection, however it might one day…manifest.”

“Severus,” Lily began. She summoned every reserve of patience she had developed as the single parent of a fairly over-bold boy, though she found that her bounds had not been so sorely tested since a seven-year-old Harry had stolen three of their neighbor’s puppies from a basket in their living room and secreted them away in the spare bedroom of his and Lily’s apartment. “I am not a wide-eyed muggleborn girl in a Hogwarts uniform any longer. I have lived in the wizarding world for all my adult life, and many more years than I lived outside of it. And I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

“Lily…” Severus drummed his fingers on the table in obvious frustration. “I don’t want to offend you, but of _course_ you don’t know what I’m talking about. You’re not…no matter how long you live in the wizarding world, accomplished witch such as you are, you’re not going to be privy to what happens in Pureblood drawing rooms. Nor am I, at least not firsthand. Your Black might understand it best, try as he does to pretend otherwise. Maybe he should have been the one to speak with you.”

Of course, Severus recognized his mistake at once—but still, too late.

“ _Sirius_ knows about this? _Sirius_ and _Narcissa_ and _you_ , scheming some ridiculous arranged marriage for Harry in the twentieth century?” She wanted to pinch herself. “I must be hallucinating.” Lily knew that her notorious temper, a fretful beast that she had the displeasure to know her son had inherited, was out of its cage.

Severus did too, by his expression. He stood up cautiously, eyeing her like she was a coiled snake or a tiger with bared fangs. “Narcissa spoke to us separately. I agreed to relay her message.”

“And is it some Pureblood nonsense that she can’t speak to me directly?”

“A…proxy, mutually known, is the typical mediator of such things, and as I know the children as well...”

Lily made a sharp, silencing gesture and scowled at him. “That was a rhetorical question, Severus.” Under the anger was her academic’s curiosity, and she considered letting her temper win out, but allowed herself to stiffly ask the question instead. “Are there materials you could leave me with?”

Severus’s eyes shrouded at the dismissal, while the ghost of a pleased smirk passed over his mouth, too brief for anyone who spent less time than Lily studying his moods to have witnessed. “Of course. I left them on the Woodyard table in the second drawing room.”

Further evidence of his premeditation, Lily thought hotly. But she couldn’t expect anything less, and the evidence of how well he knew her would later please her, when she had the presence of mind to consider it better. For now he edged away from the table toward the kitchen floo, looking as awkward as he had when they fought as adolescents.

Lily propped her chin in her hand. “It’s just a fight, Severus,” she said, though her voice had a hard edge. “Floo me later and tell me you’re sorry, even if you’re not.”

He went still and raised an eyebrow. “Those are my instructions, are they?”

Lily nodded, determined to give him no further concessions. She was too furious. Severus paused again, then sighed loudly and walked into the floo.

In the second drawing room, three large volumes were stacked neatly within arm’s reach of one of the chairs Lily favored. She snorted, glaring at them for a few moments and imagining Severus placing them there the evening before, then spending the night with her as though he had no plans to unveil a ridiculous Malfoy plot to her the next morning.

But they were books on a subject she’d never heard mentioned, so she abandoned her sulk to the minimum extent required to sit down and pick up the first book, scan the title and subject line, and compare it to the other two.

 _The Magick of Family: Past and Present_ ;

 _The Cultural Connotations of Combining Names, a recitation on the magical laws of engagement and marriage_ ;

 _Making and Breaking Familial Promises – A Complete Guide_.

Presumably Severus had arranged them in order for a reason, so she took a childish pleasure in opening the book from the bottom of the stack and skimming the table of contents, only to discover that it was a far more practical and specific text than would make a proper introduction to the topic. So she sighed to herself and opened _The Magick of Family_ and began to read at the first page.

When the floo chime rang a few hours later, Lily dropped to her knees with the second book under her arm. Severus cleared his throat, which made a few embers shower Lily’s lap harmlessly.

“Lily, I apologize for not delivering Narcissa’s message immediately, and for any impression I gave her that having me relay at all would be appropriate in your view, when you would doubtless feel she should communicate her concerns herself.”

“Well,” Lily said, her lingering anger undone by his specific, accurate—and, apparently sincere—recitation. “The books explain why you did not.”

Severus inclined his head, either to acknowledge that fact or to hide an amused smile which her still-sensitive temper was not ready to see, Lily wasn’t sure. She decided to give him the benefit of the doubt.

“Will you come through?”

He did, and she rolled her eyes at his wary look and embraced him, enjoying the feel of his body beneath his robes even though they had only been apart for part of a morning.

“I can’t stay,” he said regretfully. “Mandatory staff meeting.”

“It’s summer,” Lily complained. “What on Earth is there to do?”

Severus’s shoulders shook in one of his silent laughs. Lily had no idea what she could have said that he would find so funny.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So, I neglected this (favorite) project to work on my far more angsty and popular project. Sorry, favorite readers, if you're still out there! This chapter is also pure fluff, I'm aware. I couldn't decide on the next major plot development, meant to come in this chapter, so instead I expanded the scenes I had and--well, fluff ensued.


	5. Chapter 5

August 12, 1993

The Haunted Waters

 

Gilderoy shook the sea spray from his hair for the dozenth time, glaring at the auror who had perfunctorily taken possession of his wand before they boarded the non-magical craft that was taking them to the still-distant island of Azkaban. He knew very well the unkind effects that persistent saturation of this kind would have on his famous golden curls.

On the subject of Gilderoy’s fame—the Auror, whose name Gilderoy had immediately forgotten (Elpinn? Lyon?), was curiously immune. Or rather, he seemed familiar enough with Gilderoy’s visage to have prejudged, but not in the usual way. Gilderoy wondered if he was one of those Muggleborns who were offended by any departures from the heterosexual majority. Gilderoy’s mother hadn’t been that sort, but certain Muggles were, Gilderoy was aware. It was one reason he rarely joined Greengrass in her forays into Muggle clubs, though she insisted he was being paranoid.

In any event, Gilderoy’s lingering hope of charming his way into retaining his wand was snuffed out when he dimpled at his escort during their introductions back on land, and was met with a stony, impervious and, let’s be honest, rather pinched and pockmarked stare in return. Oh, well. Lady Redington had assured him his task would needs be done wandlessly, and he had prepared accordingly.

 “Shouldn’t you be asking questions?” asked Auror Whatsit, his tone sharp. He had been monitoring the oars with constant focus.

”Are you sure you can spare me the attention?” Gilderoy winked. “You’ve been watching those oars so closely, I thought you might be rowing them wandlessly.”

The Auror folded his arms. “Maybe I was, for all you know.”

Gilderoy, detecting no sarcasm, hesitated. Few wizards were capable of wandlessly animating anything larger than a tooth pick, and that handful were certainly not operating rickety boats in the gods-forsaken waters around Azkaban. Pointing that out seemed impossibly uncouth, even considering the nasty affect of his erstwhile companion, so Gilderoy only smiled.

”I’m familiar with a good _Impelio_ Charm, as it turns out,” Gilderoy said, which was true. It was also true that he should be asking questions. He claimed to be preparing a book that would include a recounting of his visit, and if that had been the case, he would have wanted as much material as possible from which to paint an exaggerated portrait of this perilous crossing.

When a wave created just under the hull and tilted them at a near sixty-degree angle, Gilderoy paled, swallowed, and reconsidered the level of exaggeration which would have been necessary for the hypothetical scene. He could hardly imagine anything more terrifying than this: pitching and yawning with the fretful waters, far from any land, wand out of reach and no magic but a rowing charm to prevent nature from exercising its rath against them.

”Would there be more Aurors with me, were I a prisoner making this journey?”

The Auror sneered. “You’d be in a full body bind, so there’s no need for overstaffing.”

Gilderoy clutched the edges of his rough wooden seat and gulped. Involuntary paralysis was the one thing that _would_ make all this worse. “Hopefully no one in that state would fall in,” he said uneasily, looking over the boat’s edge and feeling ill.

”Sure they do, from time to time,” said the Auror carelessly. “Why do you think they call these the haunted waters?”

At that eerie announcement, Gilderoy was sure he saw, in the flash of a moment, an upturned face in the water, smooth and pale and tortured. It was gone before he could even gasp, almost certainly a figment of his imagination. But he didn’t look in the water again.

Several lifetimes later, the boat knocked up against the stony shallow surrounding the island proper, the prison itself still so distant it could have been an ordinary, craggy mountain, the fluttering black silhouettes circling it merely birds. Gilderoy shuddered, wet to the bone and shivering. His pride was finally exhausted to the point that he quietly asked the Auror for a drying charm, and tried not to shudder at the poor quality of the magic when the Auror obliged with a smirk. Worried his hair was stripped worse than by a bad bleach job, his skin feeling painfully arid, he scrambled out of the boat and silently cursed the dark lord, his mad widow enforcer, and—ruefully—the Obliviate spell and the day he’d learned it.

Nearly worse than the crossing was the indelicate hopscotch of navigating the rocky, waterlogged stretch to what passed for dry land. He’d seen the Auror cast a sticking charm on the soles of his boots, but supposed it the courtesy was on offer he would have let Gilderoy know. As a result, Gilderoy was again saturated up to his waist by the time they stepped onto solid stone at last, and too distracted by plotting his next step to look up and notice how the forgotten castle had loomed close in the interim. When he did, all his relief at reaching its doors evaporated. In all his travels, he’d quite honestly never seen anything worse.

”Since you haven’t asked, I’ll just tell you,” said the Auror. “The castle was once the home of some mad dark wizard. He created the dementors.”

”As an experiment,” Gilderoy agreed, pleased to have the opportunity to startle the omnipresent sneer from the Auror’s face. “He was trying to resurrect his family, after a particularly nasty plague wiped them all out in the space of a few days.”

”I don’t know about that,” the Auror said skeptically.

”I’ve done some research, you see,” explained Gilderoy. “Really, the purpose of my visit is primarily to observe the...ambience.”

The Auror frowned doubtfully, but he obviously wasn’t bright enough to be properly suspicious. He led Gilderoy on, and the air grew dense and miserable.

”It’s them,” the Auror said, his expression strained, noting the way Gilderoy inhaled sharply. “But they’ll not bother us. They are only sensing our purpose.” He looked up, and following his gaze, Gilderoy went dry-mouthed to find a dementor suspended close above them, its countenance black and empty inside its cowl. “Tour,” the Auror said loudly, as one might issue a command to a crup. The dementor moved on, and up, and emitted a low-pitched cry to its fellows. They grouped together, a slow-moving swarm of tattered black fabric, and swooped inside a yawning dark window a hundred feet high in single file. Shortly thereafter, a rope net ladder flew from the window and settled against the sheer stone wall.

”No wonder these prisoners rarely get visitors,” Gilderoy muttered, following the auror over to grasp the rough-hewn rungs.

”If you wanted to see someone, the dementors would bring them to the observation room,” said the Auror. “For the tour, they’ll get them to their cell blocks and lock them in, for security purposes. You won’t get to walk around and conduct interviews, if that’s what you were expecting.”

”No,” Gilderoy lied. “I wasn’t.” He focused on climbing, nervously revising his plan in the back of his mind. He _had_ expected to be able to single out Pettigrew, he _had_ expected to hold his wand, but he _hadn’t_ expected quite so dim an Auror. Surely he could work with that little scrap of good fortune? 

The observation room proved to be a semicircular chamber with tall windows fogged with the grime of a century of damp conditions, and a series of stone tables which at first appeared rough-hewn and empty, but a closer inspection revealed they were intricately and three dimensionally etched with the view of the levels of the prison as seen from a bird’s eye. Upon it were tiny human figures made of stone, quite obviously haggard even in miniature, moving to and fro. They were as sluggish and free of purpose as the jellyfish Gilderoy had seen when he went deep sea diving with a Muggleborn ex-boyfriend. Interestingly, Gilderoy was pretty sure that was also the last memory he had of being this insufferably _wet._

“Can you tell who’s who?” he asked, fascinated by the spellwork despite his physical discomfort. His back and arms were wrenched and sore from the tense episode in the boat and the climb through the window. Gilderoy was slender on purpose. He had no interest in exercise, and so much of it at once was alien and taxing.

”Nah,” said the Auror, looking bored and impatient. 

“Then what’s the point?”

”It’s leftover from a long time ago,” said the Auror, joining Gilderoy and frowning down at the living sculpture. “There may have been more spells then, or it might have just been basic security. To see when they were missing someone, or if they knew the occupants well, maybe they could tell them apart.” He shrugged.

”Hmm,” said Gilderoy. “I’d like to speak to some of the prisoners.”

The Auror’s scornful face went abruptly blank with surprise. “What?”

”Any random occupant will do,” Gilderoy continued, as though oblivious to the Auror’s reaction. “It will give me an insider's view, you see.”

The Auror was shaking his head. “No. You may be a friend of the minister’s sons, but even then that’s...that’s too much. It isn’t done.”

Gilderoy sauntered casually to another table, gaze moving fast over the tableau, head turned so that to the Auror he would appear barely interested. His heart was beating fast. For all his sins, he’d never seriously contemplated casting an Unforgivable. But he braced himself anyway, stumbling backward suddenly and pointing at the table in mock dismay.

”Is that a _child_? I know that the population isn’t separated by sex, but I assumed _some_ precautions were being taken...!”

”What...?” Roused, the Auror strode around the table and scowled at the general area to which Gilderoy was pointing. “I don’t...”

Very swiftly, Gilderoy seized the wand from the standard-issue Auror holster, carelessly exposed by the Auror’s open robes, and before the idiot could realize what was happening, Gilderoy was compelling the unfamiliar, mundane oak wand with the fiercest will he could muster.

” _Imperio_!”

****

Morning House

London

 

Zack's fathers were arguing again.

They never raised their voices—at least not that Zack ever overheard—but their furious whispers were a harsh cacophony all the same, especially when one had ears like Zack's. A werewolf wasn't supposed to have the same senses as a human they did as a wolf, but Zack did. Sirius said it made him even more special than he already was. "Obnoxiously special," Sirius liked to say. Even though Zack was too old to fall for such obviously subjective feedback, it still pleased him to hear it. 

This time, he could tell, they weren't arguing about anything too Big. The Big things were never discussed for this long; after a brief back and forth, Sirius would exit whichever room they'd been in, with his metaphorical tail between his legs. Actually, once he'd left as a dog, and the posture had been literal. Zack always loved playing with Padfoot, but the older he got the more he worried that it was a bad sign when his father assumed that form too often. Zack understood, from his own cyclical time in a canine body, what kind of an escape that special brand of energy could offer. He wasn't sure he'd be able to resist turning into a wolf all the time, if he had the option.

Zack was laying on his stomach on the floor outside the parlor door, because he was still small enough that, this low to the ground, he could slip beneath the detection of the anti-listening charms that all parents, his most certainly included, seemed to acquire spontaneously as soon as the child in their care developed curiosity. Using his elbows for purchase, he dragged himself a little closer, and just like that the low and inaudible murmurs were easy to make out.

"...don't know why but it's like you  _try_ to get on Lily's bad side," Remus was saying.

"It's good for a kid to have a little fun, Moony. Besides, you know as well as I do how Harry was a real mess last year. I told you about that bloody diary. If he wasn't so lonely, I can't imagine it would have gotten under his skin like it did."

"The map is dangerous," Remus said firmly. "We're lucky we got away with everything we did."

"Harry's hardly going to take up an independent study as an Animagus. I like to think he has a lot of James in him, but he's got Lily's practicality."

"Which brings us back to why we're not giving him the map! Lily would never agree, and we can't give her son something like that without her permission."

Sirius's voice became rather stiff. "I'm not sure what it has to do with her. It was James who it belonged to, James and all of us, and..."

Remus sounded tired. "I'm not getting into this with you again. It's not your job to..."

Zack slinked away. Best not to press his luck and get caught, or they'd go back to silencing charms, which were impossible for even his ears to overcome. But later, when Sirius emerged first, shortly followed by Remus, Zack crawled out from under the table he'd been crouched beneath and darted into the parlor, sniffing delicately. He followed his fathers' freshest combined scent carefully. It was a difficult job, as they often used the parlor so the aroma of them both was heavily layered on the furniture and book shelves. But Zack was very good at tracking, and it wasn't long before he was tugging open a drawer and shuffling through its contents, before he found a small, aged bit of parchment. It was blank, but magic had a smell, too, so Zack would have known it was something more even if he hadn't been listening in.

He had forgotten to get Harry a birthday present, but maybe this would suffice. He rearranged things back the way they'd been in the drawer, closed it softly, and turned and froze. Padfoot was sitting in the doorway, watching him. The shaggy black dog cocked its head to one side, as though curious, then rose, turned, and padded away without comment.

For a moment, Zack thought about putting the parchment back. Doing something without either of his dads knowing was one thing, but doing something when only one knew felt different. It felt like taking sides, almost. He swallowed, but the idea of giving Harry something forbidden was too much for him to resist. Besides, it was something to do with Hogwarts, Zack's lost dream that he was doing his best to live vicariously through Harry, demanding endless details about every class, professor, and as many lessons as Harry was willing to summarize. He thought it was probably guilt that made Harry as patient as he was, but Zack couldn't bring himself to care. He wanted, perched at his desk listening to Remus drone on during their tutoring sessions at home, to be able to daydream about a distant, unparalleled castle far north, walking the same halls his fathers had.

Horrified, Zack realized he was still frozen in the parlor, watching the empty doorway where Padfoot had been, and on the verge of bursting into tears.

 _Don't be such a baby_ , he ordered himself viciously. He had his dads and they had everything they needed because Sirius was powerful and Pureblooded and only turned into an animal when he felt like it. Zack had it much better than many kids did, let alone the majority of werewolves. He should stop thinking about what he didn't have, and focus on what he did.

That mantra firmly at the forefront of his thoughts, he wondered how long he had to wait to ask to go to Grimmauld Place.


	6. Chapter 6

September 1, 1993

“What I still don’t understand,” Hermione said, and Harry braced himself against his impatience when she said the same thing she had been saying at intervals throughout the train ride, “is how there can be _no_ texts. No texts, at all!”

Mason Andrews and a handful of other third-year Ravenclaws muttered in commiseration, and Harry reflected on the known fact that only Ravenclaws could possibly be this concerned about the prospect of an entire class without required reading. As Harry’s muggle friends had taught him, it was foolish to look a gift horse in the mouth. He had said as much to Hermione, and learned after a minutes-long lecture delivered in a furious whisper that receiving a subpar DADA education was in fact the _opposite_ of a gift.

Harry had resigned himself to mediocre instruction in that subject—welcomed it, even, so long as whomever they had wasn’t Voldemort in masquerade. He hunched his shoulders closer to his ears as if that would drown out the Ravenclaws’ rehashing of the injustice of arriving to a class deliberately unprepared, and stared out the window at the Scottish countryside.

He almost wished Draco was with them. Draco had some magical ability to draw Hermione out of her steely-eyed rants, and steer the conversation to something more interesting. It was his Pureblood tea party training, Harry suspected, having witnessed the same ability in Narcissa during his involuntary visits with Sirius the summer before. Suspiciously, after a summer of seeing Hermione and Draco both almost constantly, Draco had vanished from Grimmauld Place entirely roughly two weeks before. While Harry hadn’t considered them precisely _friends_ , they had all been committed to unraveling the diary mystery, and Hermione was a solid nexus of connection for the two boys. Draco’s sudden absence from their summer afternoon appointments even seemed confusing to Hermione, who _did_ visit the Manor and reported nothing out of the ordinary there.

“How was your summer, Harry?” When Harry looked up, it was into Mason’s unsmiling face. Mason had the least expressive face Harry had ever seen aside from Professor Snape, but though it had made Harry nervous at first, Harry now knew Mason well enough to read the warmth of sincerity in his steady brown gaze. They hadn’t spent much time together since first year, but they were always friendly when they saw one another. Or, Mason’s version of friendly.

Harry tipped his head to the side to lean against the window and smiled. “It was all right. Stayed around home.” That was true enough. His _days_ , at least, had been uneventful.

Harry slid out of his seat when they arrived at Hogsmeade station and skulked after Hermione, who was carried on a Ravenclaw tide toward a bigger group of blue ties on the platform. In that forlorn moment, Harry saw Draco stepping off the train, flanked by Goyle, Crabbe trailing behind as he fumbled with the clasp on his book satchel. Draco was looking down with a deep frown, but his eyes rose briefly to meet Harry’s, before darting away as though scalded. He seized a startled Goyle by the elbow and began talking at him determinedly. It was the least subtle act Harry had ever seen, and left him feeling more confused than ever.

“Potter!” Blaise’s unmistakable voice was in Harry’s ear a moment before he slung a strong arm around Harry’s shoulders. Dazed, Harry grinned, blushing a bit like he always did at Blaise’s rare, but invariably physical, displays of affection. Theo was slouched beside Blaise, his tie artfuly loose and thrown back over one shoulder as he leaned against a pillar with his ankles crossed, looking elegantly bored, as was his way, but he quirked his mouth and arched a brow at Harry, and Harry smiled and nodded back.

Harry hadn’t seen Theo or even Blaise since Harry’s birthday, which had been a mad affair in the garden at 12 Grimmauld Place, technically hosted by Sirius, so that Harry’s various Slytherin school mates could attend without committing a social faux pas. Harry had hated that it was necessary to practically banish his mother in order to get together more than one friend who happened to be Pureblood. He was still learning the complexities of the wizarding upper class, and wondered if its ins and outs would ever come naturally to him. Sirius, who had been his tutor on the topic, had been as absent all summer as Draco had been in the past weeks. Harry wanted to chalk it up to everything going on with Remus and Zack, but couldn’t help but wonder when his godfather mussed his hair in greeting but didn’t meet his eyes. It felt personal, too, though Harry couldn’t fathom what he might have said or done.

The next morning was a Thursday, and Harry went through the usual orientation-style slate of classes while keeping a bemused eye on Draco, who continued to avoid him in such an uncharacteristically stilted manner that Theo, at least, was picking up on it. He arched a questioning brow at Harry after they found their seats in charms. Draco and Theo had grown up together and both had good aptitude for charms, which meant they’d always sat close together so it would be easy to partner. But after Theo sat on Blaise’s other side from Harry, Draco gave the trio a narrow look and then fled to the far end of the room to sit next to Daphne and Pansy.

They didn’t have DADA until Friday. It was Harry’s first afternoon class. When he ran into an uncharacteristically sober-faced Hermione that morning in the corridor and saw that she wasn’t carrying any books, Harry remembered that Ravenclaw third years would be just coming from their first day this term in Professor Lockhart’s avant-garde, text-free DADA class, before Herbology with Slytherin.

“That bad, was it?” Harry asked, his smile fading a bit with concern as he took in a haunted sort of gleam in Hermione’s eyes.

“Um,” she said, then cleared her throat. “It was good.” She lifted her nose a bit. “I still think there would have been a way to incorporate _some_ advanced study, so that those of us who want to most _fully_ benefit from the lecture could prepare, but…” She shrugged, glancing up at Harry. “It was pretty good,” she muttered, then took off toward the greenhouses. Harry stared after her, bewildered, until Blaise and Theo came around the corner and nudged him along with them toward Herbology.

Hermione’s praise for instructors was sparing. She was respectful to a fault, but tended to frown doubtfully when other students spoke positively about their Professors, especially the most popular ones. Harry was sure she must have found Gilderoy Lockhart, of all people, completely ridiculous the year before.

Despite himself, Harry became very curious about what he would encounter when it was Slytherin’s turn for DADA. He thought all the Ravenclaws were a bit distracted in Herbology, but supposed it could be his imagination, or the dubious level of interest one could muster for the topic of four-leaf clovers. Barely magical, really. Harry recalled a potion his mother had once brewed when they happened upon a four leaf clover in a Muggle meadow when he was about seven, but couldn’t remember what it was.

It involved basil, too, he thought, a much more respectable semi-magical substance, since at least you could count on its properties even with the typical types of leaves, and eat the leftovers in a nice tomato salad. Frog’s eyes—dried, not fresh; too easy to mistake for capers in the refrigerator—and a bit of boomslang skin, he was fairly sure. She had heated her cauldron over the little gas fireplace in their apartment’s living room. Sometimes, Harry missed the hybrid Muggle-magical life of his childhood. There was nothing Muggle at all about their home at Grimmauld Place, and no place was of such pure magic as Hogwarts.

Absorbed in these pensive thoughts, he was climbing over a bench to sit beside Blaise at a curious long desk that stretched from one end of the room to the other, replacing the more traditional tables and chairs he recalled from last term of DADA. Professor Lockhart, wearing beautifully fitted black robes and with his hair in a simple plait, stood at the front of the room smiling beneficently at the students filing in, his hands behind his back.

Harry saw Draco slink in and hesitate, then take the only remaining seat on the front-row bench, which happened to be just a few people down from Harry. Harry stared determinedly at the side of his head, and Draco stared determinedly straight ahead, until Harry gave up, rolled his eyes, and went back to studying Professor Lockhart with reluctant curiosity.

“Good day, students,” called Professor Lockhart. This, at least, was a familiar greeting, as it was how he had opened class every day in second year. But his expression was so uncharacteristically solemn that the students’ dutiful response was subdued, at about half-volume. For his part, Harry forgot to speak at all. He thought he saw Professor Lockhart notice Harry’s unmoving lips from the corner of his eye, but couldn’t be sure.

“Now that I have foiled the curse of the DADA position, and know myself to be a long-term fixture in your academic lives, I took it upon myself to dedicate my entire summer to the invention of a superb new curriculum, taking advantage of the most cutting-edge research in the education of the young human mind.”

So, same guy, different robes, Harry thought mulishly, but when he tried to settle back into the skeptic’s slouch he had perfected the year before, he found the effort impeded by the fact he was on a bench and not a chair. He nearly fell backwards—might have, if Blaise hadn’t caught his arm. The girls in the row behind him snickered.

“Here are your syllabi,” Professor Lockhart was saying, not looking at Harry, but clearly aware of Harry’s moment of embarrassment. A pleased smirk that hadn’t been there before was fixed on the left corner of his mouth. With a wave of his wand, Professor Lockhart sent a fog of origami butterflies fluttering out of an opaque vase on his desk. Several students—most of them, Harry thought crossly, female—tittered over the sight as the swarm settled over the benches, one butterfly per student. Harry’s landed in the precise center of the table before him, then swiftly unfolded to reveal a square of un-creased parchment.

A lot of good some butterfly paper would do against the Dark Arts, Harry thought, leaning on his elbows to study the syllabus.

Instead of a familiar list of date ranges, or roman numerals, or vague areas of subject matter, there were only three words on the parchment: “Understand. Know. Do.”

Harry frowned and tried to lean over to see what Blaise’s syllabus said, since there was something wrong with Harry’s. However, Blaise must have had the opposite thought, because he too was leaning over to look at Harry’s, and their heads knocked together smartly instead.

Blaise winced and laughed. Harry smiled ruefully, glancing down at the same time. The syllabi all said the same thing.

“I was a fine student in my youth, even by the high standards of Ravenclaw House,” Gilderoy said importantly, souring Harry’s moment of good humor. “I memorized tables and dates for my exams, rehearsed wand movements before my OWLs—and today, I find that I can recall none of those lists or diagrams or facts or figures. Not without refreshing my memory, through research, which was the self-taught skill I used to prepare for class. So, indirectly, perhaps I learned a lasting skill. But my coursework did not offer that to me.”

Harry was cautiously intrigued. He couldn’t help a sense of recognition of himself in that description. There were a few spells he had internalized from Charms, which came naturally to him. But all he knew about history was that there were lots of goblins in it, and he certainly couldn’t brew a single potion without referring carefully to the receipt beforehand.

“Research. Context. The academic’s lightweight toolbox. I have never met a stupid duelist, or a good auror who wasn’t a bit of a book worm. Magic is an intellectual exercise, and this year, I hope to assist you in that refinement of the mind which will best serve you after you leave Hogwarts in a few short years.”

The students were quiet and attentive, and this obviously pleased Professor Lockhart, who flashed them one of his _Witch Weekly_ grins and then brought his hands around from behind his back to fold them at his waist. “But this is Defense Against the Dark Arts. Let us begin with a definition.” He produced his wand from the inner pocket of his robes and flicked it at the magicked chalkboard on the wall behind him, so that the word DEFENSE appeared there. Then he returned his wand to his pocket and looked at them curiously. “Anyone?”

It seemed obvious, and yet Harry wasn’t sure what he would say out loud if he was asked. Wasn’t “defense” one of those words that was self-explanatory? Mulling that over, he almost missed the sight of Draco Malfoy raising his hand, so that the sleeve of his robe fell back to reveal a surprisingly delicate, very pale wrist.

“Yes, Mr. Malfoy?”

“Defense is a noun, and generally means passive opposition or resistance,” he said. “But implied, too, is the adjective ‘defensive,’ such as defensive spells or other tactics. The coursework generally involves a broad study of magical disciplines since so many of them can be defensive.”

“Have you been talking to students from an earlier class?” Professor Lockhart chided, half-seriously, then winked at Draco. Harry, having seized the excuse of Draco’s volunteering an answer to stare at him again, noted in surprise that his cheek went very pink at the wink.

“In the historic context of this class, defense may not be passive—it could be active, performed by an aggressor. How would you explain that? Anyone?”

Theo’s hand this time. At Professor Lockhart’s nod, Theo said, in that even way he had when he was trying not to reveal an opinion, “In a broader effort against what is perceived to be dark, individual acts of aggression are widely considered defensive.”

Something flashed in Professor Lockhart’s gaze—surprise? Harry, while reasonably impressed by his housemates’ answers, wondered why their aptitude for this topic would surprise Professor Lockhart. Had he really thought Ravenclaws would outpace Slytherins on the topic of semantics?

“An example would be,” Theo continued in the same tone, “the Ministry’s raids to seize dark artefacts that have been on display, but untouched, for one hundred years. The initiative is considered ‘defensive,’ but is not triggered by a corresponding, aggressive act.”

Ah, so the rumors about the Nott family’s collections suffering a seizure two years before were true.

“But owning the artefacts is considered an act of aggression,” Professor Lockhart reminded the class, ignoring the way Theo’s gaze hardened like the point of a dagger. “However, I agree with you in spirit, Theo. The word ‘defense’ has an ordinary meaning that is embellished here by _context_.” He winked at the room, then, or maybe Theo; Harry checked surreptitiously, but this time Draco didn’t blush.

Several examples and brief, spirited debate later, they left the classroom and all they had done was define—sort of—a single word. Harry thought he should probably be confused, or exasperated, but instead all he thought about was the look on Hermione’s face when he had seen her earlier in the hallway.

 _Pretty good,_ she’d said. Harry had to agree.


	7. Chapter Seven

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you to [Wolf_of_Lilacs](https://www.archiveofourown.org/users/Wolf_of_Lilacs) for the beta!

September 4, 1993

There were very few places in which Lily had literally never imagined herself. She had grown up with a creative, open mind, so much so that the discovery of magic felt like a confirmation of her deeply held suspicions about the nature of the universe, rather than a shock. Lily had seen a considerable chunk of the world and intended to visit much more of it. She had gone into caves and forests and murky lakebottoms that would terrify a sensible person, to extract cursed objects or puzzle through ancient tetchy wards.

She had never quite pictured herself taking tea on Lemyn’s Lane with Narcissa Malfoy, though.

Lily had never come to understand wizarding tea taking fully. And she’d had no practice in the MACUSA, which had abandoned the tea-related traditions of its colonizers as deliberately as its non-magical counterpart. Besides that, in the war she had twice dueled Narcissa Malfoy, and personally felt that the younger sister’s skill in battle was unparalleled, even by her much more famous, now incarcerated sister.

In sum, Lily was well aware she was magically outmatched, an unfamiliar feeling. Certainly she was far from anything that could be considered home turf.

And while Lily privately thought of herself as one of the more intelligent people she knew, she had a suspicion that Narcissa was cleverer than she looked. And she looked rather clever. And elegant, and very tall.

Lily frowned into her teacup and tried to remember that Narcissa had invited her, and Narcissa wanted Lily to go along with her absurd plan. Therefore, Lily was the one with the leverage in this moment. Nonetheless,she still felt a strong and steady urge to flee.

“Thank you, Lady Potter, for entertaining my emissary,” said Narcissa. Lily had only been called “Lady Potter” once. It had been Sirius’s joke shortly after she married James; and not in good taste, as it turned out, since unbeknownst to Sirius, the Potter magic had disinherited James the instant they became engaged.

There was no trace of mockery on Narcissa’s lovely face, but something did occur to Lily, and she couldn’t help but point it out.

“I’m untitled, I’m afraid you’ll find, Miss—that is, Lady Malfoy.”

“Please, call me Narcissa,” Narcissa said graciously.

Recognizing her cue, Lily sighed softly and said her line as well, grudgingly. “And you may call me Lily.”

Narcissa beamed. “Lovely. It is my good fortune, Lily, to understand your situation slightly better than you do yourself, given my amateur study of family magic. Your title is in stasis, pending your son’s coming of age and magical proof.”

Lily had heard something along these lines before. She sipped her tea. “Hmm,” she said, hoping the noise was sufficiently polite, and looked away. The tea room was almost uncomfortably small, and plastered with valuable magical objects, décor and tea things. The wallpaper, clearly old and expensive, depicted a meadow of deer, line-drawn and drifting through the grass in a peaceful grazing attitude. When a waiter swept into the room, they startled and sprinted off to the horizon, then settled and trotted back.

“You’ve maintained the premises in Godric’s Hollow, I assume?”

Lily wished she could say “no,” since despite Severus’s irritating comments on her cultural ignorance, she knew the significance of a familial home in a marriage negotiation. She still remembered James, desperate to get her to agree to walk to Hogsmeade with him (their generation’s equivalent of a public declaration of intent) grasping her hand and insisting, “Our manor’s been in the family for sixteen generations!”

“Only the sentry house is there,” Lily said quietly. She’d rather not talk about it, for more reasons than one.

Narcissa, with her studied manners, didn’t linger on the subject of the site of James’s murder. “Lovely,” she said. “In a few years, I’m sure your son will prove, and all that has been withheld shall be restored to you. Draco tells me that Harry is a very gifted wizard.”

Lily looked up, thoughtful. “Does he?” she murmured. She thought of the boy that had been a constant visitor at GrimmauldPlace through the summer, openly affectionate with Hermione and slightly rigid toward Harry, and wondered. Harry was like James. He drew people in. He was handsome and bright and generous. But he was also like Lily had been as a child. Not bold, quick to second guess himself in social interactions, and just a bit slight for his age. She knew he was not having the easy time at Hogwarts James had. Then she thought about Draco, sleek and confident and a friend to a Muggleborn Ravenclaw, but only in private.

“He does,” Narcissa assured her. “Draco has great respect for Harry.”

The statements were increasingly far-fetched, but truly the least of Lily’s concerns. “I agreed to come here because Severus said that it was necessary. And I understand from my fresh education on the topic of engagements that I must take formal action to decline.”

Narcissa was obviously startled by Lily’s words. “Decline?”

Her hand trembled, just slightly, where it rested on the table, and she quickly snatched it into her lap and out of sight.

“Yes,” Lily said, delighting in the sudden sense she had of the emotional upper hand. “I do not believe that the future, adult relationships of children should be negotiated by their parents.” It felt good to say it, although in the back of her mind, she was thinking words like _political climate, dark lord, unity amongst the old families_ that had peppered her conversations with Sirius the past three years every time they had discussed what was best for Harry.

This couldn’t be what was best for Harry.

“This isn’t…” Narcissa paused and cleared her throat. “Flustered” was obviously a novel experience for her. “This isn’t a marriage commitment, you must understand. It is simply an expression of family will. It cannot bind our sons to anything they wouldn’t desire for themselves.”

Severus and the books had all said much the same thing. But it was too far outside Lily’s frame of reference for her to understand, and it certainly would be no clearer to Harry. And Lily had a darker, barely acknowledged suspicion that made only one outcome of this tea a possibility, anyway.

“Well?” was the first word out of Severus’s mouth later that afternoon when he walked out of the floo in Lily’s room at Grimmauld Place. She was packing for the next stop on her unbearably hopeless quest to locate fragments of the dark lord plaguing her family, and still impatient that she’d had to take time away from preparing for that bizarre tea. So her voice was short when she replied.

“’Well,’ nothing. I told her no.”

Severus, she saw in her peripheral vision, unwilling to look up from her luggage, became very still. “No,” he repeated.

“Mhmm.”

“But you’re aware that…that an outright refusal is the most offensive thing you could…Lily, what did you do?”

He sounded more alarmed even than Lily had expected. She looked up in consternation. “I know it’s impolite. I read the books.”

“Impolite,” Severus echoed, faintly. “It’s…Merlin, Lily. A hundred—oh, even fifty years ago—there were wars over such things.”

Sure he was being melodramatic, Lily rolled her eyes. “Well, times must have changed, because Narcissa didn’t so much as challenge me to a duel in defense of her family honor. In fact, I’m fairly sure she was kind enough to pick up the bill.” Lily hoped so, anyway. She certainly hadn’t paid it, and she had a feeling that wizarding establishments had some sort of mechanism in effect to prevent patrons from dining and dashing without repercussions.

Because Severus was looking actually ill, Lily walked over to him and touched his arm. “Severus,” she said more gently. “Honestly. What did you think I was going to say?”

“Yes!” he said, unhesitating.

Lily thought it over. She had fed her outrage over the situation because it protected the secondary reason for declining. Or was it the secondary reason?

Narcissa had told the truth before, when she said nothing the parents could do would bind the boys. But it would trigger the magic: a seeking, foolproof magic that would lay the foundation for two unencumbered souls to one day form a bond. The books had been very clear about that. The Mothers’ Pact, a lofty name for something as seemingly mundane as a chat over tea, was the initiating step in family alliances of the kind the Malfoys proposed. There had been no way for Lily to agree even to that.

Observing the change in her expression, Severus covered the hand still lying on his forearm with his own. “Lily? What is it?”

She sighed and stepped back. “I can’t consent to a possible, future soul bond for Harry,” she said, wrapping her arms around herself and meeting Severus’s eye. Trying not to flinch at her own words. “His soul isn’t free.”

****

Harry dreamed of Tom again. He was older somehow, his boyish good looks evolved into disarming handsomeness, his dark eyes intent on Harry’s from the other side of an empty room that had the approximate dimensions of Harry’s room at Grimmauld Place.

“What day is it?” asked Tom. His voice was different too. Deeper, harsher.

“September fourth or fifth,” Harry said. “Depending on how late—er, early—it is now.” Probably the fifth. He’d tossed and turned so long before falling asleep, it might have already been past midnight by the time he did. “Why are you older?”

Tom looked at him, expression perplexed. He stood near the wall. There was no visible source of light, but the room seemed to exist in a single dense shadow.

Tom’s blue eyes were colorless, his skin perfect alabaster, his hair thick and inky.

“What year?”

“Nineteen ninety-three,” Harry said slowly, confused. Tom had never asked for the year before. What was going on? Where was the diary—in some sort of time warp? Concerned, Harry asked again, “Why are you older?”

Something flashed in Tom’s eyes. Just a moment of molten silver, and a hint of red. “Older than whom?”

Before Harry could reply, Tom’s lip curled with scorn. “I am not him,” he told Harry.

When Harry woke, he was trembling. He wrapped himself more tightly in his blankets and drew the curtains on his bed so that the rays of moonlight through the windows wouldn’t reach him. He did not fall asleep again.

After breakfast, Hermione checked in the way she always did: silently, eyebrows lifted in inquiry.

Harry responded the way he had since the start of term. He shook his head, and felt tight in the chest when her shoulder dropped and she looked away, believing his lie.

“Presumably,” said Professor Lockhart that afternoon, “the word ‘against’ requires no definition. But what of this…” He waved his hand, and “Dark Arts” appeared on the blackboard in a heavy bold script. _As though written with reverence_. Harry was so surprised by that thought that he was badly distracted, and missed Professor Lockhart’s next question.

“Mr. Potter?” the professor prompted. Theo dug his elbow in to Harry’s side, and Harry’s head jerked up.

“What was the question?”

“Would you like to try defining ‘Dark’?”

Harry hesitated, which was dumb, considering who his mother was and what her research entailed. Then he cleared his throat. “Its plain meaning is simply the absence of light,” he said. “But in this _context_ ,” he added, which elicited a brief smile from Professor Lockhart, “it refers simply to combative or harmful magic.”

“Is that all? Is there not such a thing as magic which is dark by its nature, rather than light?”

“No,” Harry said firmly. He was aware of a few curious looks, but nothing like his answer might have elicited if there were anything but Slytherins in the room.

“Does everyone agree?” Professor Lockhart, seemingly unbothered, looked around the room.

“There is magic that is intrinsically dark, on the spectrum,” said Daphne, looking askance at Harry.

“You mean the spectrum of energy sources,” Professor Lockhart clarified, with the kind of nod that was not agreement nor disagreement. “Mr. Potter, what do you say to Ms. Greengrass’s response?”

“Plenty of magic channels latent energy,” he said. “Not just what we think of as ‘dark’ magic. Take any ritual, for example, if it’s balanced and produces a secondary effect. Or any Class C or higher potion,” he added. Warming to his topic, he said, “Lots of spells that are considered light can be used for a dark purpose.”

“Thank you, Mr. Potter,” said Professor Lockhart. He focused on Daphne. “Ms. Greengrass, does the origin of the magic matter?”

Daphne, still frowning at Harry, blinked and looked back at Professor Lockhart, coloring a little at the force of his direct attention. “Dark magic is for channeling power sources, or causing harm,” she said, nodding with a little more confidence. “So yes.”

Professor Lockhart smiled. “What is the lightest spell you can think of?”

Daphne frowned, then smiled and breathed out a laugh. “Lumos,” she said, and a few other students laughed with her. Professor Lockhart’s smile widened, and he inclined his head in acknowledgement. “And,” he said, in a more solemn tone, “the darkest?”

Her eyes clouded as she considered. “An Unforgiveable, I suppose,” she said, very quietly. “My mother always says _Imperio_ , but I would think, probably, the killing curse.”

“Would you say, Ms. Greengrass, that the killing curse is dark magic, regardless of the context?” Daphne nodded. “Who agrees with Ms. Greengrass, by show of hands?”

Harry raised his hand, and, looking around, saw that everyone else had, too.

Professor Lockhart waved his hand again, and the chalkboard filled with a new word: Unforgiveable.

“Why are the Unforgiveable curses so called?” A few hands raised, and he nodded at Marshall Avery.

“Because there is no defense. If you’re found to have used one, it’s Azkaban.”

“Correct. There was a recent conviction for use of the killing curse, just a few months ago. Did you know?”

The room was quiet, but Harry, for one, was surprised.

“How didn’t we hear about it?” asked Tracey Davis after a few moments.

“When do we hear about anything,” Theo muttered darkly. Professor Lockhart glanced at him, as though he’d heard, but didn’t address it.

“There is no requirement that Wizengamot hearings be public,” said the professor. “Do you want to know about the case?” Harry nodded along with everyone else.

“A very ordinary witch named Margaret Miniford, married to a very ordinary wizard named Lionel Miniford, was out in her orchard twenty years ago when Lionel received a bad hit from a whomping willow sapling. He was rushed to St. Mungo’s, but pronounced beyond the help of magic, and in a persistent vegetative state. Margaret took him home, and cared for him all these long years. Many friends and family attest to her diligent care, and her love of Lionel, who was left all but catatonic.

“Two years ago, Margaret began having strange, waking dreams, wherein Lionel spoke to her at length. She thought it was her imagination, yet though she had always remained positive about her life with Lionel, the dreams were bleak. Lionel described, in broken English, long years of suffering, and emotions that felt like they came from him, not Margaret, filled her heart with unspeakable pain and hopelessness. Finally, unable to credit her own imagination with the detailed and terrible experience Lionel described, Margaret contacted healers and scholars who confirmed that the simple emotions and one-word messages were, in fact, from Lionel, representing the little that was left of his damaged mind, delivered through pure will after nearly twenty years of desperate effort.

“As soon as Lionel realized that Margaret knew he was truly contacting her, his messages grew darker. Lionel felt trapped in his body, and had for years. He looked forward to nothing but death, and he began to beg Margaret for it. She insisted she would not, and could not harm him. She wept and pleaded with him to stop. But his pleas only grew more heartfelt, more constant, until Margaret could barely sleep without Lionel intruding on her dreams to beg for her mercy.

“So, one day, Margaret drew her wand, stared into her husband’s face through a veil of tears, and said that forbidden incantation. According to her testimony, given under veritaserum, in the moment the green light connected to him, she experienced through that connection that had channeled only pain and a wish for an end, a moment of dizzying joy and gratitude, and then he was gone.”

The room was perfectly silent for several long moments. Daphne’s voice, sounding very faint and small, broke it. “What was her sentence?”

Professor Lockhart looked at her with a sad smile. “There is only one penalty for an Unforgiveable, which Margaret freely admitted she had cast: life in Azkaban.”

The room erupted, this time in outrage. Daphne started to cry, Tracey wound an arm around her, and a few kids nearly got to their feet.

Professor Lockhart lifted an arm to quiet them, and when the room calmed enough that he could be heard without raising his voice, he spoke again. “Who believes, in this context, that the Unforgiveable constituted dark magic?”

No one raised their hand at first, but then Daphne did, to everyone’s alarm.

“Quiet,” Professor Lockhart told the room sharply. “Why do you raise your hand, Ms. Greengrass?”

Daphne wiped her eyes and cleared her throat. “It was still dark magic,” she said. “But just because it’s dark, doesn’t mean it’s always wrong.”

Harry couldn’t believe himself, but he nodded along with her answer. Somehow, that sounded right to him, too.


	8. Chapter 8

September 16, 1993

When Narcissa was ten, she and Andromeda happened upon a certain diary amongst their father’s things in his study.

The sisters would have been called twins in the old country; they were born ten months apart and earned a pained, black look from their mother whenever she beheld them. It was obvious to anyone who knew anything about the Blacks that Narcissa was a last ditch effort to produce a male heir, their family’s stubborn preference despite the gender-egalitarian attitude of broader Pureblood society. Narcissa thought her father’s siblings, particularly Walburga, breathed a sigh of relief when the healer held up a howling Narcissa and declared her to be a girl.

Druella was not the maternal type. Everyone knew the Rosiers drowned their Squibs and were therefore trained not to bond too closely with children who had yet to demonstrate any magic. Andromeda was kinder-hearted than most of their family, but she was too close to Narcissa in age to feel particularly protective. Bellatrix, three years older than Andromeda, delighted in turning her little sisters against one another, easily done when they were both besotted with her.

So Narcissa was proud to have discovered the dusty, curious old thing, its red leather cover cracked with age, when Andromeda was instantly intrigued. They snuck into their father’s study from time to time for sport and to steal his spare galleons, which was only dangerous if their mother caught them. Their father was two years younger than his wife and they had grown up alongside one another. She had fashioned him into a largely silent, spineless creature from his infancy.

“It feels of magic,” said Andromeda, a crease in her brow as she turned the book about in her hands. “But it just looks like a diary.” She opened the book cautiously. No one really knew how an old magical book might behave. But the cover parted without event, revealing a crisp, blank first page.

Then some words appeared.

They took turns carrying the diary, which had belonged to Anabla Macmillan, a grandmother of some sort to their father on his mother’s side and a woman of questionable English literacy, though her handwriting was nice. She was at least mostly mad, but had taught them a variety of old celtic spells, spelled out phonetically, and meant to be performed wandless. They experimented with them with some success, though they nearly killed an elf with a blast of fire in the garden, and their rendition of Anabla’s “spell for flying” released one of their father’s crups from its obligations to gravity, and after bumping along the ceiling it unfortunately reached a window and floated off into the distance like a balloon, heedless to their frantic efforts to terminate the spell.

It was the sort of thing that would have sent their mother into a fury, and perhaps been a cause for even their father’s concern, and if Bella knew about the book she would have certainly confiscated it for her own purposes.

So, Andromeda and Narcissa had a secret. At least two secrets, in fact, since they both pretended ignorance over the crup.

They took turns carrying Anabla’s diary, and Narcissa began to miss it when she didn’t have it. Anabla had not been much for spells, and therefore could not easily explain how she had wound up inside the diary, nor did she seem intent on discussing it. Even in a family as boldly Dark as theirs, the girls did know that they should be cautious around a brainless object with the ability to think, so while Anabla’s diary was a source of horrified delight for them both, when Narcissa woke one night to see Andromeda, staring down at her with her eyes as bright red as a flame shortly before she collapsed, they surrendered the book to their mother, shamefaced.

Narcissa did not care to recall the punishment she suffered over Anabla’s diary. Even less did she care to recall the sound of a woman’s voice crying out when her mother dropped the diary in a cauldron of diluted basilisk venom. The venom, bottled a thousand years before, was one of the rarest items in the collection of deadly substances she kept in a warded cabinet in her room. For the rest of her life, when Narcissa and Andromeda affronted her, Walburga would spit about the loss of that vial of venom.

When she wrote to the shade of Tom Riddle, Anabla was never far from Narcissa’s mind. But though Anabla had been a grown witch and Tom as encapsulated in the diary was a relative child, Anabla’s magic had been unremarkable, and Tom’s had obviously been unnatural in its power. His fragment of an original self accomplished much more, testing the bounds of the object to which he was tied, dragging Narcissa into his memories and tugging insistently at her Occlumency shields, which she had carefully strengthened with runes.

In fact, she never wrote to the diary unless she was within a protective circle, her elf Hilo on hand just in case, with strict instructions to incapacitate Narcissa at the first sign of possession. It had taken several weeks to draw this specter of a young dark lord out of his act, but eventually he realized he had little to gain by pretending with Narcissa. The beginnings of his usefulness made themselves known at that point, and Narcissa’s pragmatic Rosier half warred with the growing excitement of her Black half. She knew the danger of running headlong toward the lure of power. Had she forgotten all the examples in her own family—and she hadn’t—she had Lucius’s recent demonstration to remind her.

 _What have you decided?_ she wrote that morning. Sirius waited outside the circle, looking ill.

There was a long pause, while a spot of ink grew, as though a quill rested there. Then it became the tail of a letter, and Tom’s elegant script poured forth.

 _I have considered your argument, and cannot identify its flaw,_ Tom wrote. _If he knows I am…active, to this degree, he will neutralize me. I believe you are correct._

Victory nearly sped Narcissa’s heart, but she kept her pulse even, having noted that he could pick up on her moods when they were physically indicated. Breathing deeply through her nose, she wrote in her even hand.

_And your boon?_

There was no hesitation this time. _A body._

“Well?” Sirius said as Narcissa stepped over her runestones, and Hilo darted forward to collect them with care and return them to their bag. Her cousin got to his feet, and Narcissa noted again how pale he was, and that he had lost weight he didn’t have to spare from his lean frame. Narcissa had always thought he had more of the Black tendencies than anyone else in their generation, though she knew that would horrify him, identifying as he did as such an anomaly. He might lack the ambition, but he had all the emotional recklessness, the dangerous charisma. She straightened her robes.

“He wants a body,” she said, tone measured. Predictably, Sirius’s eyes grew enormous, and he scoffed.

“How could we possibly justify that?”

Narcissa glanced at the diary, but she knew he couldn’t overhear them. When the diary was closed and inert, he was deaf and blind and nerveless. No wonder he asked for what he did.

“We’d have two of them, then, instead of just one. It would be idiocy.”

Narcissa waited calmly for Sirius to calm himself, accepting the bag of runestones from Hilo with a murmured thanks.

“Are you familiar with the _corpeus meus_ ritual?”

Sirius looked at her, still scowling and bright-eyed, but he stopped talking and nodded.

“Well?” Narcissa leaned against the back of the settee and folded her arms.

“We don’t have the materials,” Sirius said slowly. “The ritual calls for the ill body, to remake into something whole.” But he was thinking, now, Narcissa noted. Sirius had a sharp mind, when he could be maneuvered into using it.

They thought together. Narcissa hadn’t yet answered the question Sirius asked for herself, but she trusted there would be a way. Who said the body had to belong to the soul? She had a great uncle, nearly dead from dragon pox, who they had restored with _corpeus meus_ , but it had the terrible catch of eternal servitude to the ritualist. More convenient than terrible in this context.

“Bloody terrible spell,” Sirius muttered, his eyes flashing with approval as he looked at Narcissa. “It was what’s-his-name—Antony?—that you’re thinking of, wasn’t it.”

“Antilla,” Narcissa confirmed. “But he nearly broke through the ozone layer on a broomstick to spare himself my aunt’s dominion after just a few years.”

Sirius flinched, but he also smirked. He let himself be more cruel when he was alone with Narcissa, she’d noticed.

“Always fancied yourself the master of an aspiring dark lord, have you?” his tone was light, but his eyes were hard.

Narcissa sighed. “I wouldn’t expect you to trust me with his leash.” She inspected her fingernails. “And even if you would, I share no bond with him.” She glanced up through her eyelashes, waiting for Sirius to draw the connection, and then he did an instant later.

“No,” he said flatly.

Narcissa shrugged one shoulder, annoyed. “Then think of something else,” she snapped.

“You’re just angry about the whole”—he gestured stiffly—“engagement…thing.”

“Engagement _thing_?” Narcissa echoed, her voice low and cold. She had learned the tone from Sirius’s mother, and noted with pleasure that he paled a bit further at the sound of it, leaving him as sallow as the dead. “Do you mean the spittle upon the honor of my son and heir, my blood, and my names?”

Sirius winced. “She didn’t…doesn’t…understand.”

Narcissa nearly snorted, but caught herself in time. Still, the gust of air through her nose was a very audible sniff. “You and Severus are both easily convinced by her act. She is smarter than she would have any of you know.”

Sirius appeared poised to argue, then stopped himself. “I’m not convinced by your theory, anyway.”

That was because he didn’t _want_ to be convinced, Narcissa knew, but she was accustomed to being patient with stubborn wizards. “There is one way to be sure.”

Sirius scowled, but this time he didn’t say no.

“When?”

Narcissa’s pulse thrummed, and this time she let it go, giddy. Outwardly, the only change in her cool demeanor was the lifting of a single brow. “As soon as possible.”

****

Rosemary was beginning to feel her age. She felt it when she woke in the mornings, always finding the sight of her bedroom ceiling to be something of a surprise.

 _Oh_ , she would think. _Still alive, then._

At her age, death was around some corner. She knew her body had faced too much strain to linger, as some others did, far past two hundred, and she was a hundred and ninety eight now. The second time, Phineas had died quietly in his sleep, so that Rosemary found him in the midst of her then-morning habit of rolling over and sliding under his arm, only to be startled by the cold emptiness of his body beside her.

 _Oh_ , she had thought blankly. _Dead, then_.

Her body was comfortable, as loose and relaxed as it ever got, until she tried to rearrange it and stand. Then joints protested and popped, and on occasion she would be forced to cast the spells for pain and ease that she was too proud to use all the time. Niff would bring her something black from her closet and she wouldn’t bother to correct him. It had been fifty-five years since Phineas left her for good, but Niff remembered him and his father and his grandfather, would have remembered their grandchildren’s children if they had any. For Niff, his loss was quite fresh.

Besides, she liked the severity of black. It suited her mood, if something perpetual could be called a mood.

“Good morning, Lady Black,” said Niff, as he did every morning.

“Good morning, Lady Longbottom,” said Binsy, as he did every morning.

The Redingtons hadn’t been fond of elves.

“Good morning,” she told them, wincing, and reached for her wand. It was a morning for the spells.

When she walked past the east bedroom door, she could hear stirring on the other side, but she didn’t stop. He would come down when he was ready, if he became ready at all that day. Sometimes she didn’t see him at all. Sometimes he joined her for breakfast as though nothing was amiss. Frowning, she took care on the stairs, shadowed by Binsy, Niff doubtless somewhere near the landing, as though he would catch her if she fell.

She ate two hard boiled eggs, sliced, with salt. It was muggle food, and had mystified her husbands, but she had eaten the same thing almost every morning of her life. Even at Hogwarts, the elves had ensured this simple fare found its way to the table. No one liked to admit it, but Rosemary had been raised by an aunt who was as near a Squib as one could be and still be allowed a wand. Her last name had likely had something to do with it.

After she had eaten, Rosemary waited a time, and then decided her guest would not be coming to breakfast. She left the dining room, which was far too spacious for a single old woman, and trailed to the study. Not reluctantly, but certainly not in a rush.

She eyed the warded box that was the only object on the center of the tea table for several minutes. It had been a gift from her second husband, and she was fond of it. Heirlooms or other items of sentiment always took in magic best. No one knew why and some would scoff, but Rosemary had personal experience as her own proof.

She opened the box, and put the locket around her neck. Almost at once, a cowled figure appeared across the table from her, as he might have once in his true life. Only his hands were visible; his elbows rested on his knees, his cloak pooled at his ankles. His fingers were steepled, and somewhere beyond the light of the room and the abyss of the cowl, she knew he was watching her as carefully as she watched him.

“What day is it?” Tom asked, as he always did.


	9. Chapter 9

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Thank you to Eliara for the thoughtful beta, and also helping pick up and dust off this project, which I care about so much. <3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm alive! If you remember WTF has happened so far in this story you have a much better memory than I do.
> 
>  
> 
> In general: Over the summer, Harry teamed up with Draco and Hermione to figure out a) what Tom Riddle's diary was and b) what's going on with Harry's apparent connection to Voldemort. Lily and Severus are in a happy place at the moment, though they did argue when Narcissa proposed an engagement (in the Pureblood meaning) between Draco and Harry and Lily said no - a big faux pas. But Lily thinks that Harry's soul is tied up with Voldemort's and she wants to keep it a secret for now. Narcissa and Sirius know what the diary is and have hung onto it without telling anyone else, because they think they might be able to use it against Voldemort himself. Lady Rosemary has the locket horcrux and is communicating with it. 
> 
> At the start of third year, Harry is as socially awkward as ever, and Draco is acting funny around him. Everyone is pretty fascinated by Gilderoy's new DADA curriculum, and it's already starting to cause a cultural shift for the students. 
> 
> I think that's the gist! Thanks for reading!

September 12, 1993

Hermione had always been cautious, but the summer before, exchanging letters with her mentor, Lily Evans Potter, she had received a piece of advice which she had taken very much to heart.

“Academia is adventure,” Lily had written, and Hermione had immediately written the quotation in her journal, then a few moments later she had added it to the charm that made certain messages spring onto the surface of the lavatory mirrors every time she used one. She lay awake that night thinking it over, the  _ rightness _ of it. She would never make a name for herself by simply following where others had already walked. She had to step out on her own course and chart new territory.

She had the thought in the back of her mind every time she attended a class, which changed the experience for her considerably. Instead of considering the material to be locked in, something to be memorized, rote, she tried to study it as an evolving truth. She ceased answering questions and began asking them of the professors instead, a change in her pattern that seemed to alarm them. She was torn between frustration and satisfaction when she posed a question they couldn’t answer. She was finding the boundaries of settled knowledge, but often they were nearer than she would have liked.

The energy in the DADA classroom both appealed to her new outlook, and at times conflicted with it. When she crafted a question meant to be piercing, all she tended to get in response from Professor Lockhart was a serene smile.

The class before he had been pushing them into debates about soul magic as dark magic, so Hermione expected that was a segue into a deeper study of the field. She went to the library and cast her best research spell – a derivative of the indexing from the Malfoy library which Draco had taught her – but a tickle in her throat made her trail off rather uncertainly at the end. She assumed that miscasting was the reason a single faint thread illuminated instead of the dense web she had been expecting, as her request had been somewhat general.

She almost recast. But instead, oddly curious, she followed the bit of magic where it led.

The book was enormous, but not particularly long. It reminded Hermione of collections of maps or art in a Muggle library or the coffee table in an upscale home. She took it gently from the shelf, and the spell that had lit up its spine disappeared under her hands, causing a faint tingling sensation she knew well, and which made her smile reflexively.  _ The Arte of Portraiture _ , the title declared. So the spell had gone quite wrong, Hermione mused.

It was too early in the term for the library to be crowded. Most of the students wouldn’t begin studying in earnest until exams were nearer. Having the space so silent and private made Hermione doubly content, and though she wasn’t usually one for leisure reading, the book was very pretty and she was always weak for pretty books. So she carried the book to a broad empty table and opened it.

Hermione had never studied portraiture; it was not an elective at Hogwarts, if it was formally taught anywhere at all, and while the portraits had of course amazed her as a First Year, joining the lengthy list of Things to Understand As Soon as Possible, she had yet to have the time to look into it properly. Now the portraits were just quirky bits of art to her, not unlike wizarding photographs.

The book laid everything out quite simply. A portrait could be imbued with the knowledge of the subject at the moment of its creation. Once, the most common portrait subjects had been musicians and storytellers, because the resulting portrait could offer entertainment in dull moments. And of course there had always been appeal in preserving the memories of family members.

The spells were not difficult. The likeness needn’t be well done. Amused by the thought, Hermione opened her notebook, made a crude sketch of herself that was more stick figure than anything else, topped it with squiggly hair and touched her wand tip to the parchment.

“ _ Translatio _ ,” she incanted, tapping the handle of her wand three times with her thumb according to the instructions.

She felt a sensation like an electric shock, and then all of a sudden, the self-portrait was striding back and forth across the empty page with a gait that Hermione couldn’t help recognizing. She leaned close and narrowed her eyes, and then jerked backward when she heard her own voice come from the figure.

“Is there something I can help you with?” asked Hermione’s first self-portrait.

Hermione laughed, but then something occurred to her. The book said portraits didn’t distinguish between short and long term memory; they recalled everything they were taught as crisply as though they had learned it a moment before.

“I’m going to read aloud to you a bit, and you can help me study this later,” Hermione said, easing her charms text out of her satchel. The portrait really was too crude for Hermione to say for sure, but it seemed to perk up with interest.

Hermione read quietly – not to herself, but at the same time, more or less to herself – for a few hours. When she returned  _ The Arte of Portraiture _ to its shelf, she let her touch linger on the cover the way she always did when she felt a book had  _ given _ something to her; it was a kind of thanks, and not a habit she would ever confess.

Draco was waiting for her when she got back to the table to gather her things. He had draped himself over a chair and had one hand hovering nervously over his head, as he did when he very badly wanted to run an agitated hand through his hair, but couldn’t bring himself to disorder it. At the sight of Hermione, he sat up and put his hands on his knees.

“There you are,” he moaned, even though he couldn’t possibly have been waiting for longer than a minute. Hermione beamed at him.

“Yes, here I am. Is there something I can help you with?” 

“It’s  _ Potter _ ,” he lamented, and Hermione sighed, sitting in the chair next to Draco’s and twisting to face him. He had his head thrown back, which was excessively dramatic but also a good look for him. His silvery pale hair streamed backward, all the sharp planes of his face visible as a result.

“This again?” Hermione was trying to be understanding, but also privately agreed with Lily Potter that engaging two thirteen year old wizards who only barely got along was archaic. Not to mention that the thought of Draco being engaged to anyone made Hermione dizzy with grief, but of course that bit of information was more private yet.

Draco closed his eyes. “I just wish I didn’t know. I could be as stupidly ignorant as  _ him _ , and going about my life. Instead I  _ do know _ , and…Hermione, what if he  _ does _ know, and  _ agrees _ with his mother?” He darted a look at her. “Do you think he agrees with his mother?”

Hermione had a sudden, painful suspicion. “Do you care if he does?” she asked carefully. Something snapped closed in Draco’s expression, and she had her answer.

“No,” he said, looking away. “This library is too stuffy. I don’t know why you don’t study in the Ravenclaw library.” He was getting up and busily packing Hermione’s texts back into her satchel. “If Slytherin had its own library, I’d never darken the doorway here.”

“Hmm,” Hermione hummed. His change of topic was dreadfully obvious, but Hermione was eager to be redirected. She took the satchel from Draco, since on principle she never let boys carry her things, and listened to him ramble on about how  _ common _ it felt to be regulated to shared spaces in a public school without interjecting. If anyone else said the things Draco did they would be very offensive, but Hermione knew he meant less than half of what he said. For Draco, words were armor, and sometimes a lance, though even then, rarely wielded with forethought.

And apparently he had a bit of a thing for Harry Potter.

****

Barty was never supposed to know the coordinates of the seeking runes. That he did was the final effect of a sequence of unlikely disasters, wherein a dozen of the Dark Lord’s most trusted had all met their untimely and almost simultaneous end. It was really just coincidence – good luck or bad, depending on who you asked – that Abraxas Malfoy had given Barty the secret at all.

He had wanted Lucius, and had tried to wait for him after he was summoned. But after several long minutes, wheezing through a curse that was liquefying his lungs, he finally had no choice but to pull Barty close and convey the message directly into his ear. It took the last of Abraxas’s strength, and he left a fine mist of blood and saliva on Barty’s cheek.

Then, an hour or two after that, Barty went to Azkaban.

During the earliest days of his imprisonment, he had thought to hope for rescue by his Lord. Surely there was a failsafe; surely it had not truly fallen on Barty alone to hold the key to the Dark Lord’s return. In the somehow bleaker prison of his father’s home, he was constantly reminded that the Dark Lord was gone. The decade-long absence seemed to be Barty’s proof that he had been the cause’s last hope, and he had failed.

Imperius carried with it a certain blank emptiness to which Barty generally surrendered. He emerged for the brief periods wherein his routine was broken by the presence of his father. Despising him leant a certain purpose to Barty’s otherwise rudderless existence. And there were the dismal intervals leading up to and directly following the renewal of the curse. It would begin to lose its luster, and just when Barty was nearly free of its effects and the fog had fully cleared, his father would never fail to renew it. Bartemius Senior was a fanatically detail-oriented man.

Winky brought him broth in the afternoon. On the days when the curse’s effects were waning, she would speak to him; she didn’t bother during the other times, when he was barely able to focus on her long enough to string more than a few words together.

“Winky’s poor young master,” she said to him on this day, which was like so many other days that Barty felt afloat within it, free of reference. He saw his reflection on occasion, and knew he was marked by years. “But soon,” Winky continued, lifting a spoonful of warm liquid to his lips with her steady hand, “Winky’s young master will be very glad.”

Barty looked at the elf sharply, but she had said as much as she could. They held silent eye contact, and Winky was teary with excitement, which made Barty’s heart kick hard against his ribs. She was just a stupid creature, really, but he had been stubborn in his hope, and she seemed  _ sure _ . Sure of what, she would likely disobey his father trying to explain, but her long ears fairly trembled and her luminous eyes shone with happiness.

Barty swallowed the broth, and for the first time in as long as he could recall, it tasted flavorful. He could make out part of a window in his peripheral vision, before it disappeared into the perplexing blank darkness of the interior of the invisibility cloak his father bade him wear even at home. He thought the sunlight, streaming through there, was particularly bright and lovely. The more he thought about it the more he was sure. Someone was coming, for Barty, at last; and more intoxicating than the thought of freedom was the thought that he would then have a chance to carry out his sacred task. That  _ he _ could assist the Dark Lord where no one else could.

The excitement, after years of listlessness punctuated by sorrow, was exhausting. Barty fell into a sleep so peaceful and deep, his father, returning later that evening, was able to recast the Imperius without waking him. Winky watched from across the room, her ears laid back against her head.

_ Soon, _ she thought,  _ Winky’s young master will be parted from the old master _ . Her warring loyalties tore at her heart, but she thought that she had done right. How momentous was her task, to serve her dead mistress, and her living master, and their child in equal measure. Just the thought of it made her hurry off to heat the iron; she would feel better when her hands bore its marks.

She was safely away and weak with pain when the wards alarmed and her old master came stumbling down the stairs with his wand high. Though it pained her to ignore the wards, Winky stayed low to the floor in her den, her hands clutched close to her chest and still hot from her efforts with the iron, until her old master called her directly and she couldn’t resist.

Of course, she had known when she mentioned the flaw in the Crouch wards to the Longbottom elf Binsy that Binsy would tell her mistress, and Binsy had already made it clear that Binsy’s mistress knew Winky’s young master was very much alive, and Binsy’s mistress was loyal to the Dark Lord.

Winky had known that the old master would find out about Winky’s part, as soon as they came for her young master. But she had no choice, had she? She thought that she had done right.

“ _ Winky _ ,” her old master shouted, towering over her, face bright red with the force of his fury. He kicked her first, and because his toe caught the wound on one of her hands, she was dizzy with pain for several moments and did not hear what else he had said at first. It was the feeling of something soft falling on her chest that roused her, and in dismay she saw it was a glove.

“Get  _ out _ ,” snarled her old master. But of course the magic was already forcing her away, as it would any other who didn’t belong. She looked up at him through her tears in the last moments before she was ejected.

“Winky is sorry,” she managed. “Winky’s mistress…” but before she could finish, she was hurtled through the door and out onto the lawn, where she lay in a trembling heap until her old master’s – her former master’s – shouts drove her from the property altogether.

But as Winky walked, her despair eased. She felt the terrible burning sensation in her hands and looked down, startled. It was easy to heal herself; why hadn’t she done it yet?

The magic passed over her skin like a balm as soon as she had the thought, and the glove she had been clutching fell thoughtlessly from her hand. There were vast woods past the Crouch property, and they beckoned to her. She fell to all fours and felt more comfortable that way. With her nose closer to the ground, it was easier to pick up the scents and trails.

She’d had a kerchief wound around her like a tiny toga, but as her knees became tangled in it she struggled loose of its confines. By the time she was free of it, and had soil under her nails and the night’s breeze in her nose, the spells that had bound her at the moment of her birth had breathed their last breath.

She no longer recalled her sense of duty or identified with the name she had been so honored by when it was chosen for her. She felt nothing at all one way or another about Bartemius Senior, his dead wife, or their liberated son, much less any guilt about her part in it. She felt only eagerness to be out in the deepening shadows, and so she lengthened her stride into a quick rhythm and joined them.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I just needed a house elf to have a happy ending!


End file.
